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Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014
1-1-1986
A history of liberal education and liberalism : the traditional humanist in conflict with the liberal ideologue.
Richard A. Farrell University of Massachusetts Amherst
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A HISTORY OF LIBERAL EDUCATION AND LIBERALISM:
THE TRADITIONAL HUMANIST IN CONFLICT WITH
THE LIBERAL IDEOLOGUE
A Dissertation Presented
By
RICHARD A. FARRELL
Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION
February 1986
EDUCATION All Rights Reserved
Richard A Farrell A HISTORY OF LIBERAL EDUCATION AND LIBERALISM:
THE TRADITIONAL HUMANIST IN CONFLICT WITH
THE LIBERAL IDEOLOGUE
A Dissertation Presented
By
RICHARD A. FARRELL
)rovec^^y to ^le and content by:
David Schuman, Chairperson of Committee
f UnMJt William Kornegay, Member
Richard Trousdell, Member
School of Education To Hannah Arendt, who helped me to see the world
through fresh eyes. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first acknowledge David Schuman's contribution. I cannot imagine having initiated--let alone completed--this dissertation without the benefit of David's insights, humor, care, and his uncanny knack for knowing the right words to say at the right moment. I am also deeply grateful to Patricia Sweetser who overwhelmed me by generously offering to edit this manuscript and then with intelligence, wit, and charm convinced me that my argument would be stronger if there were less of it. I would like to thank my fellow students, particularly Lucy Nylund, Judy Siciliano, Jacqueline
Smethurst, and Lee Totten, whose projects enriched my own. Next, I would like to thank William Kornegay and Richard Trousdell for their help as members of my committee. Bill's knowledge of the history of education was invaluable as was his generosity with his personal
library. Dick boyd me up by his interest in the project and his
helpful suggestions and criticisms along the way. Several other
friends also gave much needed help. Dennis Rader and Phyllis Rodin
helped tremendously by simply believing in me. Along with Dennis,
Kathy Dardeck, Charlie Creekmore, and Lisa Wright formed an emergency
typing pool to finish an earlier draft. And Quinton Baker opened his
home for my use as an office and was understanding of my problems
despite facing more severe ones of his own. Finally, I thank Bernie
McDonald for guiding me through the last obstacles to completion,
typing the final draft, and making it all as easy as possible.
V ABSTRACT
A History of Liberal Education and Liberalism:
The Traditional Humanist in Conflict with
the Liberal Ideologue
(February 1986)
Richard A. Farrell, University of Wisconsin
M.Ed., Ed.D., University of Massachusetts
Directed by: Professor David Schuman
In this century much has been written about the "search for a common learning" and whether or not the liberal tradition should be
buried or can be revived. This dissertation shows that there are in
fact two liberal traditions and our discussion of these issues have
been confused by our failure to distinguish between the two. One
liberal tradition is essentially educational in nature, inspired by
the life of ancient Greece and formalized for centuries as the liberal
arts. The second is essentially political in nature and stems from
the thought of John Locke and the philosophes of the Enlightenment.
The two traditions have been in conflict over the course of this
country's history, the former attempting to preserve a traditional
sense of liberal education and the latter serving to reshape the ideal
of liberal education to fit the tenets of liberalism.
VI The dissertation shows that the two traditions have become confused through the rise of liberalism and its success in shaping the structure of higher education and educational thought through the university movement in the last century and the progressive education movement in this century. The dissertation traces the history of both liberal traditions and shows how the tenets of liberalism have come to permeate present day discussions about liberal education. The world views of the ancient Greeks, Renaissance humanists, American Puritans, and American liberals are compared and contrasted, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between Puritanism and liberalism. The
Puritans initiated and maintained their version of liberal education for over two-hundred years and it was this curious situation that made liberalism seem, in comparison, to represent the "true" vision of liberal education. Like the Puritans, liberals have reconstructed the concept of liberal education to suit their own purposes, and this
reconstruction is examined.
The dissertation concludes with suggestions to traditional
humanists for reviving the humanist ideal of liberal education. The
point is made that rather than concentrating upon plans for shared
learning humanists must first recreate a common language with which to
discuss liberal education and, to avoid confusion this language must
be distinguished from that of liberalism.
vii TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION . i V
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . V
ABSTRACT . vi
INTRODUCTION . 1
CHAPTER
I LIBERALISM AND THE LOST MEANING OF LIBERAL EDUCATION 12
The Problem of Meaning in Our Time . 13 Meaning and the Humanist Perspective on Liberal Education . 17 Liberal Education and Liberalism . 22 Liberal Education Trapped Within the Liberal Mind . 28 The Confused Humanist . 39 A Gap in the Literature . 48 Summary . 52
II THE GREEK SPIRIT OF LIBERAL EDUCATION . 57
Interpreting the Hellenic Spirit. 58 The Spirit and Form of Liberal Education.. 71 Summary . 80
Ill HUMANISM AND CALVINISM: THE GREEK SPIRIT FOUND AND LOST . . 84
lY PURITANICAL HUMANISM: THE FOUNDING OF LIBERAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA . . 98
A Learned Clergy and a Lettered People . . 100 The Problem of Human Nature . . 103 . 106 Reason . The Purpose of Harvard College . . no . 119 Conclusion .
vii i CHAPTER
V LIBERALIZING LIBERAL EDUCATION . 122
John Locke and the Enlightenment Theory of Progress.. John Locke: Progenitor of the Modern Liberal Mind.124 Liberalism and the Theory of Progress.127 Liberalism in the Young Republic . 129 Higher Education Before the Civil War . 135 The Dilenma of the Liberal Reformers.139 The Eliot Period—1869-1909 145 Liberal Education in the Aftermath of the University Movement . 156 John Dewey and Liberal Education . 163 General Education . 169 Denouement.177
CONCLUSION: HINTS FOR WOULD-BE HUMANISTS . 187
BIBLIOGRAPHY . 197
IX INTRODUCTION
If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives. It is well known how many have lost the will to live, and have stopped trying, because such meaning has evaded them. An understanding of the meaning of one's life is not suddenly acquired at a particular age, not even when one has reached chronological maturity. On the contrary, gaining a secure understanding of what the meaning of one's life may or ought to be-- this constitutes having attained psychological maturity. Bruno Bettelheim
The debate about technical training versus liberal arts really misses the point. We need to rethink the whole idea of what education adds to--or subtracts from—any single person. It is time that a college education provides a chance for a student to really begin and practice what the student thinks best. David Schuman
This study is motivated by the belief that education should help the individual develop a meaningful perspective on his or her own life. We are familiar with the critiques of modern Western society, the emphasis on the alienation of the individual, the "future shock of rapidly expanding knowledge, the breakdown of traditional ties. It
seems that individuals are more than ever in need of help in finding
meaning in their lives and that despite all of our talk of meeting
student needs, we concentrate least upon this one. As elusive as the
1 2 question of meaning is, we can consider the ways in which education either adds to or subtracts from the individual's sense of meaning.
When speaking of meaning in relation to education we often refer to "liberal education." About 150 years ago this term had a meaning that was generally shared by those who discussed education; however, this meaning has been become muddled through the numerous adaptations
of the concept to the circumstances of twentieth century life. Even
so, the promise of liberal education is often articulated by
educators, a promise that one is better off developing a general
knowledge rather than a specialized one, for gradually this general
knowledge will become integrated into a meaningful perspective on
life. Though this integration is the most problematic step of the
process, educators give it little attention. We seem to assume that
with maturity we will integrate this knowledge into a meaningful
perspective. Bettelheim seems to suggest something different, that
psychological maturity i_s this meaningful perspective.
Allow me to use myself as an example. By general standards I
had as good a liberal education as most before entering graduate
school. A history major at the University of Wisconsin, I had a broad
course of study and a few inspiring teachers. I proceeded to
supplement this formal education through travel, various kinds of
work, and sel f-expl oration through acting and therapy. Yet, I
returned to school sensing that something was missing, not sure that
this "something" was possible to find there, but with the hope of
integrating knowledge and experience in a satisfying way. 3
The public explanation for my return to school was the need to
"retool" myself to be better able to compete in the job market. Given the few work prospects in foundations of education departments, this could not have been my primary motive, but it sounded more sensible and mature than saying; "I am groping for meaning." In retrospect, I see that I was searching for my own aesthetic sense, which David
Schuman describes as "the critical cord that ties life together." I had believed in the promise of a liberal education, but the promise had yet to be fulfilled.
Looking back upon my own liberal education I admit that it did give me a broad understanding of many fields of knowledge, did compel me to think about things, and to realize how little I know. My liberal education had taught me to question, to be skeptical, to see
other points of view, but it did not give me that aesthetic sense,
that critical cord with which to tie things together. Instead it
overwhelmed me with how little I knew and how much there is to know.
Many think that this is exactly what a good education should teach,
but such a realization does not simply teach one a proper humility; it
also teaches despair of ever knowing enough to act.
I am not alone in feeling that my education has failed to give
me sufficient help in making sense of the world. A recent article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education states that "a growing number of
adults, many of them older people with college degrees" are returning
to study the liberal arts. The author then speculates upon their
moti vations-"an attractive alternative to the singles bar," or 4
"successful lawyers and other professional people want programs that cover what they did not get initially," or "as one gets older, one ponders the eternal verities more." I speculate that a number of these students feel a more pressing need than the author recognizes, that they, like myself, are looking for that critical cord, but I doubt that a course or two in the liberal arts will be of much help.
The habits of mind, categories of thought, assumptions and values that are dominant in our society work against our developing our own points of view, our own aesthetic senses. We share a collective point of view based upon a system of biases that we hold as assumed truths; grouped together they have been called the liberal
ideology. Collectively we think in terms of progress, reform, welcoming new knowledge and diversity. We are individualistic,
pragmatically realistic, believing in greater opportunities for all,
reason, compromise, diversity, toleration, and we strive to understand
all points of view. The problem is that we seem better able to see
the points of view of others and to compromise than we are able to
distinguish our own point of view and advocate it--unless, of course,
one's own point of view accords closely with liberalism.
Liberalism provides three basic points of view, three brands of
meaning, through our education. One is centered upon striving for
success--!iberal individualism; a second stresses one's contribution
to a more perfect society-liberal humanitarianism; the third and most
recent emphasizes personal exploration, self-acceptance, and
clarification of val ues-1 i beral psychological humanism. Having 5 explored these paths I have come to believe that none of these perspectives--or a combination of them--can give me the meaningful perspective that I have sought through my liberal education.
By experiencing and studying the history of liberal education I have come to realize that the concept is incompatible with our liberal ideology in important ways. Understanding the nature of this incompatibility is difficult, for it is obscured by the rhetoric of freedom and possibility of liberalism and the liberals' partially successful transformation of liberal education to fit the liberal mind-set. Since one finds only occasional mention of the distinctions between liberalism and liberal education in the literature on the latter--only as asides--the significance of these differences goes largely unnoticed.
Gilbert Highet provides an example of such an aside in The
Immortal Profession. While discussing the qualities of a liberal teacher-- "liberal" as in liberal education--he feels obliged to insert: "The word 'liberal' has frequently been misused by political writers. It has been suggested that a liberal education ought to be controlled by the principles of those political parties which preempt the word 'liberal' in their titles or their programs. This is a mistake, and a dangerous mistake."^ Highet warns us but goes no further with the issue.
How does one differentiate liberal education from liberalism?
David Schuman's study on the meaning of higher education helped me to begin to distinguish between the two. Using interviews totaling 6
"about twenty hours apiece," Schuman concludes that, "People who do best in the world...are those who have a sense of what they think is most beautiful, what is aesthetically pleasing." And he suggests that college as it is now structured seems to give little help in this regard. Schuman attributes this to our liberal vision of the market¬ place of ideas, in which truth is supposed to prevail in open competition. He feels this view is unrealistic: "We know that in the academy, academics fight for power so that their ideas will win, instead of the other way around." Rather than working to bring students closer to the "truth," the marketplace of ideas produces many truths making "the student divide himself or herself into parts: a history part; a science part; a social science part. Five courses,
five truths, and five selves." And Schuman concludes: "The structure
of college is such that the student learns, quite naturally, many
visions of the truth. In the end it makes it very difficult to see
the world in any kind of unified way, or to know who you are in it."^
Masked by the idealization of the marketplace of ideas, the education
that our universities actually provide runs exactly opposite to the
"connected vision" that has been central to the concept of liberal
education. Let us consider another significant difference between liberal
education and liberalism. The key to liberal education has been the
teacher, the educated individual directing the uneducated, not simply
through subject matter but by example. One developed a thoughtful
perspective by spending time with teachers who exemplified it. The 7 teacher's moral authority is central to the tradition of liberal education, and if the teacher abuses his or her authority or is unworthy of it then the teacher should be replaced, not the idea of authority itself. However, the liberal's mistrust of authority has been combined with his optimism about human nature to glorify the idea of self-directed learning, which has been the rationale for electives at the college level and progressive education at lower levels. (It might be that this emphasis on self-directed learning is simply our admission that we ourselves do not fare well at making sense of the world, and so have little to teach in this regard.) The glorification of self-directed learning only further confuses us in our attempts to offer or find a meaningful education. We have lost a sense of liberal education through the habits of mind of our liberalism; although the two share the word "liberal," the attitudes of mind are essentially different.
In the conclusion of his study, David Schuman suggests that we replace the idea of the university as a marketplace of ideas with "a multiplicity of 'pure' institutions," in which "structure, ethics,
ideology, and outlook should be coordinated." With serious
playfulness he suggests the possibility of an Ultra-Conservative
University, a Freudian University, a Capitalist University, even (a)
Liberal University."^ Such a suggestion clarifies, perhaps by
exaggeration, the fact that there are many other assumptions and
values included in the liberal ideology that also contradict or
distract from the traditional concept of liberal education. In order 8 to develop a sense of what liberal education can be in our times we must distinguish it from liberalism, including our own.
In the first chapter I will describe the nature of our present
confusion between liberalism and liberal education, and how this
confusion prevents us from seeing the possibilities of a meaningful
liberal education. I will begin by describing the loss of traditional
beliefs in religion and philosophy that once gave a sense of meaning
and purpose to life. I will then describe the insights traditional
liberal education has to offer and how these insights are lost in our
confusion between liberalism and liberal education. I will support
this contention by describing the general nature of discussion
regarding liberal education today, indicating how this discussion is
more reflective of liberalism than traditional liberal education. I
will conclude by describing the gap in our historical perception of
liberal education, and suggest that we must examine the history of the
concept to understand our present confusion.
Having described the nature of the problem in the first chapter,
in the second I will describe the Greek spirit which has inspired the
admiration of the humanist over the centuries and in turn given life
to the tradition of liberal education. In doing so, I will
distinguish between the spirit of liberal education and its
formalization in the liberal arts and systematic philosophy, and will
show how the spirit was lost in the process of formalization. A sense
of this spirit will be important in later chapters when we examine
liberal education from the perspectives of Renaissance humanists. 9
American Puritans, and American liberals. We will compare and contrast their spirits with that of the Greeks, and in turn judge whether or not their education should be called liberal education.
In the third chapter I will describe the humanist revival of the
Greek spirit in the Renaissance and the Calvinism that evolved out of humanism. The general purpose is to explain how the humanists were largely in accord with the Greek spirit while the Calvinists were not.
This is an important difference since Calvinists initiated liberal education in this country and controlled its practice for over 200 years.
In the fourth chapter I will examine the nature of this
Calvinist, or Puritan, mind and its version of liberal education, since it was the curious nature of a Puritan liberal education that made the liberal seem to be the "true" advocate of liberal education.
In order to understand the Puritan version of liberal education I will examine the founding of Harvard College, both its purposes and operating principles.
In the fifth chapter I will trace the decline in Puritan influence on liberal education along with the rise of the liberal perspective. I will show how the central issues in American higher education have revolved around the struggle between Puritanism and
liberalism. I will also show how in this century the advocates of a
traditional sense of liberal education were forced to contend with a
new version of the concept based upon 20th century liberalism, and how 10 with the ascendancy of the progressive movement in education and politics the old sense of the term became confused with the new.
Having clarified our confusion between liberal education and liberalism education, I will conclude with a few suggestions for humanists who are interested in reviving the traditional sense of liberal education. 11
FOOTNOTES
^Gilbert Highet, The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (New York; Weybright and Talley, 1976)," p. 46.-^ 2 David Schuman, Policy Analysis, Education, and Evervdav life (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1962)', pp. 233-241.-^-
^Ibid. CHAPTER I
LIBERALISM AND THE LOST MEANING OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
The humanist tradition of liberal education has much to offer those of us who believe that education should help individuals make more sense of their lives, but it does not fit well with our modern biases which since the seventeenth century have been increasingly based upon a scientific search for truth. From the scientific perspective the "eternal verities" often associated with liberal education are now thought of as mere personal opinions and consequently carry much less weight than the verifiable discoveries of science. And hand in hand with science, liberalism has grown, the primary cause of our lost sense of liberal education. With the rise of liberalism the concept of liberal education increasingly became confused with an education in liberalism. Education was increasingly defined and conceived of in the terms of liberalism, with its emphasis upon individualism, scientific knowledge, and the new over the old.
The general purpose of this chapter is to explain why traditional
humanism might in fact have insights to offer us regarding a meaningful education, and then to describe how liberalism interferes
with discussion of these insights and with educational practices based
upon them.
12 13
The Problem of Meaning in Our Time
We live at a time when it is particularly difficult to find an explanation of life that we find meaningful, a sense of belonging to this world. A meaningful explanation of life helps make one feel at home in the world, while alienation is the feeling of being isolated from, of not being a part of this world, and in turn not feeling at home in it. In this section I will expand upon this point with the help of three humanists: Hannah Arendt, Michael Denneny, and William
Barrett.
My images of homelessness stem from the thought of Hannah Arendt as does much of the following sketch of our contemporary malaise.
When she speaks of the "world" she is referring not merely to the natural world but to a world made human by speaking and thinking about it. Traditionally this world was interpreted through transcendent
ideas such as God, immortality, and freedom and it is our loss of such
interpretation which underlies our pervasive sense of meaningless¬
ness. As Michael Denneny adds, it was the "accepted assumption of
Western thought that the world around us (Becoming) could be
understood only through the illumination of a transcendent,
intelligible world (Being)." As tenuous as this invisible "world" of
ideas was, the belief in them provided the ground for the traditional
authority of religion and philosophy, which maintained a meaningful
explanation of life, via religion for the many and philosophy for the
few. 14
Since Descartes we have developed a modern way of thinking which no longer tries to tie us to the natural world but instead divides us from it. With Descartes thinking about the world became divided into an objective material world and our subjective responses to it. The sense of human reality which had traditionally tied the natural world to an invisible "world" of ideas gave way to a sense of reality which conformed to that which could be empirically tested. The pursuit of knowledge, which had been directed by a sense of ideals intuited from the invisible realm of ideas became restricted to a knowledge of the material world. Transcendent ideas were reduced to a matter of personal subjectivity.^ Without the explanations provided by both religion and philosophy each of us is left with the task of making sense of things alone without the aid of general concepts or universal rules.
Voltaire said something to the effect that if there were no God man would invent one. If not a God, certainly a secular faith was developed along with the rise of science, a faith based upon the belief that science could both enlighten the human condition and improve it. Thus, while the traditional ways of making sense of the world were in decline this modern faith sustained many individuals with the belief that if we were only free of the superstitions of religion and other traditional constraints a more perfect world could be built guided by the discoveries of science. While there still are
some who seem to find their sense of meaning in this philosophy the
idea of progress no longer seems to stir the imagination as it did in 15 the late nineteenth century. There has been much questioning over the past thirty years over the nature of that which we have assumed to be progress, combined with the more current sense that we do not seem to be progressing in any sense of the term, except technologically.
We go about our lives in a world that lacks the sense of permanence provided by either a transcending order of ideas, or a stable material world, or even the permanence of nature. With the rise of the scientific mind nature has become viewed as something simply to be exploited and controlled, to the point that there are now a number of endangered species, including ourselves. Without a sense of permanence in either things, nature, or ideas it is very difficult to feel at home in the world and to find meaning in life.^
This then is our modern human predicament, and there is an additional dimension to the problem which William Barrett describes in The Illusion of Technique. Barrett points out that not only is this
problem of meaning a difficult one for us to grapple with at this
time, but that few of those who might be expected to give us help in
this regard, the professional philosophers, even address the issue.
With the rise of scientific thought and its subsequent application to
all fields of human endeavor, ideas have all become instrumental in
nature, all a means to the end of controlling the material world. We
suffer from an "illusion of technique," believing our primary problems
are technical in nature and can be solved by improved techniques.
Barrett cites Buckminster Fuller as a representative of this way of
thinking. Fuller's position is that technology has created grave 16
problems as well as many benefits, so we must perfect our technology, create a more comprehensive technology, a technological utopia, or
technology will lead us to oblivion. Barrett argues that even if this
technological utopia were realized, it would still fail to give our
lives a sense of significance: "With life become [sic] empty and
sterile, even while mechanically perfect, we might very well find that
utopia and oblivion coincide."
Rather than improved techniques Barrett argues that we need
ideas that make a difference in our lives, ideas that "may not serve
so much as an instrument we use but as something into whose service we
are called." Stated another way, we need ideas that inspire us at
least to some extent in the way that the idea of "God" once did.
In particular he talks about the idea of "being" which as we
noted earlier, was traditionally considered the highest concept in
Western philosophy, but now is largely ignored by most English and
American philosophers. They too suffer from the illusion of technique
and are busy tidying up philosophy into a science, preoccupied with
linguistic analysis, telling us what we mean by what we say rather
than attempting to come to grips with the issue of meaning in its
deeper sense. These philosophers argue that answers to these
questions are, strictly speaking, unknowable.-^
I have turned to the humanists because individuals such as
Arendt and Barrett are willing to reflect upon these issues while few
others are. As if in response to the reluctance of the analytical
philosophers to think about the unknowable, Hannah Arendt has asserted 17 that "men have an inclination, perhaps a need, to think beyond the limitations of knowledge, to do more with this ability than to use it as an instrument for knowing and doing." Let us now take an initial look at the tradition from which such thought sterns.^
Meaning and the Humanist Perspective on Liberal Education
A university education "is concerned not merely to keep an intellectual inheritance intact, but to be continuously recovering what has been lost, restoring what has been neglected, collecting together what has been dissipated, making more intelligible, reissuing and reinvesting." Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott suggests a key element in the humanist attitude of mind, the tendency to search the past to make the best of
it still alive to the present.^ As Hannah Arendt describes this
attitude, it "knows how to take care and admire the things of the
world." Engagement with the world through thinking and caring about
it, and in turn feeling a part of it, gives the humanist a sense of
meaning. When Arendt, Barrett, and Denneny discuss meaninglessness,
they do so in a meaningful way in illuminating what has been lost,
clearing the ground of our confusion and prompting us to think about
it. While "humanism" has come to mean different things to different
people in this century, it had a singular meaning to the historical
scholar who coined the term in the last century. It was used to 18 describe the spirit of the renaissance scholars who had enthusiastically rediscovered many of the great works of ancient
Greece and Rome. These scholars were particularly inspired by
Cicero s portrayal of the human ideal of the Greeks, which he called
"humanitas," and since Renaissance scholars often referred to this
"humanitas," in their own works, 19th century historians labelled them
'humanists." Thus, in the original sense of the term, "humanism" referred to those who looked to the Greeks for "that ideal pattern of humanity which stirs our imagination," in the words of Werner Jaeger.^
Even among traditionalists this meaning has been broadened in this century to include the great works and deeds of the past, in general, although ancient Greece tends to be given preeminence.
In the following pages, I will use "humanist" and "humanism" to refer not simply to the Renaissance scholars but to the tradition which they embodied, a tradition characterized by study and reflection upon great human works and acts prompted by the desire to find a pattern of humanity that inspires. In this loose sense of the term,
Socrates may be considered a humanist as well, for he is the paradigm
of the individual thinking about life, and he has been particularly
admired for his refusal to give up either his thinking or his
conversing with others about it, even though this refusal cost him
his life.
As with humanists who have followed him, Socrates' thought was
inspired by "admiring wonder" at the acts of his fellow Greeks.
Seeing just or courageous deeds inspired him to ask what is justice 19 and what is courage? Socrates attempted to discover the ultimate aim of life by exploring the meaning of what we now call concepts. As
Hannah Arendt suggests, the basic Socratic question was: What do we mean by such words as "courage" or "justice" or "beauty" or
"excellence"? And to this Arendt incisively adds that our inability to give exact answers to these questions does not diminish the
original sense of wonder, but reinforces it.
How marvelous that men can perform courageous or just deeds even though they do not know, can give no account of, what courage and justice are.'
Despite the fact that such discussions do not bring a clear knowledge
of the nature of courage or justice or excellence, one feels enriched
by them. According to the philosopher J. Glenn Gray, such
conversations satisfy our "hunger for the sense and significance of
human life in terms of the relations we can discover between the world
of appearance and the world of thought." Stated another way, as we
relate the particularities of our lives to concepts such as beauty or
excellence or friendship we give those concepts real content and make
them our own. Over time this develops our sense of taste, which in
turn shapes a point of view. It is my sense that this development of
one's individual judgment is a fruitful pathway towards a meaningful
perspective on lifej we may feel gratified by what we choose to honor
and what we chose to despise, and in turn make choices which give our
Q lives a sense of meaning.^
In this initial sketch of the humanist attitude of mind, I have
implied an emphasis on thinking over knowing. I have done so in the 20 light of an important distinction made by Hannah Arendt about a decade ago between the need to think and the need to know. She argued that thinking is ultimately a quest for meaning while knowing is a quest for truth. In the quest for meaning, thinking transcends the limitations of knowledge. Therefore, the criteria of "certainty and evidence" that we apply to our quest for truth are not the ultimate criteria to be applied to our quest for meaning. In other words, there are certain matters worth thinking about despite the fact that they are unknowable.^ According to J. Glenn Gray, Arendt was the first to clearly make this distinction between truth and meaning, although it was implied by both Kant and Heidegger.
Although Gray noted that "it will likely require years for the
implications of her insight to be realized in full," one implication
is that this insight placed the old works on liberal education in a
new light.While a liberal education has always implied an
attainment of a broad knowledge, humanists have always implied that
the aim of liberal education was more than the attainment of knowledge
per se. Plato spoke of the highest form of knowledge, and Aristotle
of a "liberal knowledge" that gives pleasure in itself. Cicero spoke
of a philosophic attitude that resulted from liberal studies. Newman
spoke of an "enlarged mentality" which provided one with the capacity
to make judgments. This is summed by Whitehead:
You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge; but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom...(which)...is the way knowledge is held. It concerns the handling of knowledge, its selection for the determination of relevant issues. 21
its employment to add value to our immediate experience.
Therefore, in the light of Arendt's distinction, while these humanists often spoke in terms of knowledge, I think they were actually emphasizing thought and its relation to judgment. The aim of liberal education was always defended in terms of knowledge, because thinking was assumed to be a quest for knowledge, primarily a philosophic knowledge, a knowledge related to Plato's ideal forms. As
I have already indicated with the rise of science this form of knowledge was discredited, and since now "knowledge" is the province of science rather than traditional philosophy, Arendt's distinction seems all the more important.
Education within a framework of tests and grades puts a premium upon knowledge. What if we reversed this emphasis? An education guided by the quest for meaning would be shaped differently than that guided by the pursuit of truth. And the difference captures a key distinction between liberal education, which emphasizes thinking in the quest for meaning, and liberalism education, which emphasizes the attainment of knowledge, and the application of knowledge to problem
solving. While we may refashion the world through knowledge, we make
a home out of it through thought.
However, before we can think about and discuss this matter of a
liberal education aimed at meaning, we must first free ourselves from
the liberal ideology that confuses our thought on the topic. Within
the framework of our liberal ideology, liberal education has been 22 misconstrued to seem like an education in liberalism. I will now begin to describe the nature of this confusion.
Liberal Education and Liberalism
For over a decade, it has been argued that the liberal arts no longer liberate, that indeed the liberal tradition itself is either dying or dead. If the latter is true, the obituary will be hard to phrase, for the concept of liberal education is ambiguous. Clifton Conrad and Jean Wyer Liberal Education in Transition^^
The concept of liberal education has always been ambiguous for
it has revolved around ideas such as excellence, freedom, and wisdom,
which are themselves ani)iguous. The problem with the concept today is
not its inherent ambiguity, but the fact that this ambiguity has given
way to incoherence. The source of this incoherence is the confusion
of liberal education with liberalism. In this section I will discuss
the causes and nature of this confusion, indicating differences
between the traditional humanist's vision of liberal education and
that which has evolved out of liberalism.
Conrad and Wyer seems to share the confusion in referring to the
tradition of liberal education as the "liberal tradition." As most
commonly used the "liberal tradition" refers to the political
philosophy of liberalism that has had an increasing influence on
Western educational thought over the past two hundred years. However,
this liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, not in
ancient Greece, and is separate from the tradition of liberal 23 education. A primary source of our confusion between the two stems from the curious origins of liberal education in this country. It was initiated and promulgated for over two hundred years by Puritans who
rejected the whole pagan theory of life," in the words of the historian Harry Elmer Barnes. The liberal tradition in education developed out of this Puritanism and has been aimed at freeing education from its constraints. However, liberals had relatively little interest in the traditional concept of liberal education. In other words, the choice in America has been between liberal education in the hands of Puritans, or a liberalism education which either ignores or distorts the concept of liberal education to fit the assumptions and values of liberalism.
It is important to distinguish between the two traditions
because each reflects a distinctive mind-set. The mind-set of liberal
education is best represented by the humanist whose primary
educational concern is to introduce students to the life of the mind,
to arouse in them the love of thought, and to persuade them to think
through their experiences. The liberal, on the other hand, is
primarily concerned with the perfection of society and the role that
education can play in this. Thus, the humanist has tried to encourage
thinking about such thought-things as excellence, freedom, and
justice, while the liberal has been "bound up with the spirit of
reform, a sense that education could be consciously arranged to make
1 American society more open, more just, and more democratic." 24
The liberal has attempted to make the tenets of political liberalism serve as the guideposts of education. Thus, we have
President Charles Eliot of Harvard defending the elective principle in the last century by arguing that liberty is the best education for liberty, and we have the progressive education movement in this century making the classroom into a micro-democracy where one learns to be cooperative. More recently President Adele Simmons of Hampshire
College suggested that "the complexity of social and environmental i ssues... di c tates interdisciplinary attempts to solve them and underscores the value of interdisciplinary training."^^ These various attempts at shaping education into an instrument for creating good citizens and solving our social problems are examples of liberalism education, not liberal education.
The situation has been further confused by a split within the liberal mind itself between an emphasis on the freedom of the individual on the one hand and the desire to perfect society on the other, a split reflecting the complex historical association of
liberalism with the rise of capitalism on the one hand and Enlighten¬ ment thought on the other. While the principle of individual freedom
protects individual selfishness, the aim of liberalism education is
the inculcation of "reason" to transform selfishness into enlightened
self-interest. In its contemporary form -- well represented by
Hampshire College and the School of Education at the University of
Massachusetts -- it tends to emphasize self-directed learning on the
one hand and a curriculum that points towards reforming society on the 25 other. There is also a concentration on what are called individual needs on the one hand and societal needs on the other. Given the complexity of our society, and the vast stores of specialized knowledge about it, the effort to envision reform requires a great emphasis on cognition. To balance this, liberalism educators also stress the need to develop the affective realm as guided by the theories of humanist psychologists as opposed to humanists. It is my sense that this emphasis on exploring the self is a turning away from a world that one cannot make sense of, a world in which the liberal split-vis ion of rugged individualism on the one hand and perfecting society on the other are not as believable or inspiring as they once were.
The meaning of a liberal education, on the other hand, lies in the process itself; this is how I interpret the phrase "learning for learning's sake," traditionally associated with liberal education. To the humanist, thinking and talking about what matters in life is itself meaningful. As Hannah Arendt has noted, "thinking does not have a real goal, and unless thinking finds its meaning in itself, it has no meaning at all." Thought and dialogue about what is important to us in this world create a sense of belonging to it. Through shared
reflection on ideas whose reality lies beyond knowledge, the humanist
literally creates a human world, together with those that she or he is
conversing with.^^'
This concern with the invisible world of thought is quite
different than liberalism's vision of perfecting society through 26 education. While humanists may be concerned with societal issues, in terms of education they are more concerned with specific individuals than with the abstraction that we call society. The humanist's aim is to develop the quality of being thoughtful, whether one's politics are conservative, liberal, or radical. While I would not quite classify
Daniel Bell as a humanist, he is free enough of his own liberalism to state that while he is politically a liberal, he is economically a socialist, and educationally a conservative. He reflects the humanist's perspective to the extent that he can see that different areas of endeavor may be best guided by different principles.
The humanist also tends to look askance at the emphasis of
liberalism educators on the development of the affective realm along with the cognitive realm as a way of developing the whole person. To
redress our overemphasis on the cognitive with a new emphasis on the
affective does not dissolve the split; it maintains it. Instead, the
humanist tends to think in terms of what Hannah Arendt called
"passionate thinking, where thinking and aliveness become one." From
this perspective, the liberal's alternative emphasis on self-
realization dwells too much on the self, while his or her attention to
society dwells too much on society, leaving a gulf between the two, a
gulf not spanned by mixing interdisciplinary attempts at studying
social and environmental issues with courses on self-realization
techniques. Instead the gulf is bridged by studying works that cause
one to reflect upon one's assumptions in an educational setting which
stresses reflection upon ideas combined with reflection upon 27 experience. The aim is not a clarification of values-another aspect of liberalism education--but a thoughtful perspective on what is worthwhile, what is worthy of aspiration.^^
This is but a cursory attempt to suggest that liberal education in a humanist perspective differs from the liberal tradition. While there are several reasons why we have lost sight of this distinction, the principle one is that liberalism in the form of progressive education has come to dominate our educational philosophy. The progressives, led by John Dewey, have viewed the traditional concept as elitist and archaic. They have attempted to replace the traditional concept with one of their own, and in the process have dismissed the traditional sense of the term. For example, in terms of the tradition of liberal education, the opposite of liberal is not conservative but illiberal, referring to those pursuits that are conducted not for their inherent worth or pieasure--or, in contemporary terms, meaning--but for the sake of something else.
Under the influence of the progressive education movement and
the rise to dominance of liberal ideas in Political Science,
Psychology, and Economic Departments, liberal education has become
identified with liberalism in the minds of many. In turn, the
traditional sense of the term as well as the distinction between
liberal and illiberal have been forgotten or ignored. In a recent
book on liberal education the author begins by stating,
"Conservative" in this context is taken as the contradictory of "liberal." Thus, some so-called "liberal arts colleges" are in reality conservative arts colleges.^' 28
Here is a good example of the liberal mind at work. First, it ignores the fact that the opposite of "liberal" was not "conservative" but
"illiberal," and then denies that liberal arts colleges are sufficiently liberal. If this definitional slight of hand is allowed to stand our historical amnesia concerning the tradition of liberal education becomes complete, and liberal education is transformed into liberalism education.
Of course, the attempt of the progressive movement to transform the sense of the term has been only partially successful. There are too many academics and intellectuals who share the traditional sense of the term. Thus, a review of the literature on liberal education reveals works written from both perspectives and often one that combines elements of each. Since there is also no attempt to distinguish the principles from each other, the reader understandably becomes confused. Before we can talk about the elements that make liberal education meaningful we must first disentangle the two broad poihts of view of liberalism and traditional humanism.
Liberal Education Trapped Within the Liberal Mind
By experimenting with various types of college courses, we in the United States are attempting to find the modern equivalent which was once the product of "the collegiate way of life"... President James Conant of Harvard^®
What I have called "liberalism education" is best represented by
"general education," a phrase liberals hoped would provide a
contemporary equivalent to traditional liberal education. General 29 education" has grown in usage during this century because the concept of "liberal education" had undergone so many changes in trying to adapt to the twentieth century that for many a new term seemed a good idea, especially to liberals who wanted this "modern equivalent" to be free of the elitist and archaic connotations of the old concept. As I will show, 'general education" has been an empty concept which both traditional humanists and liberal progressives have tried to fill with their beliefs, which has made the concept signify intellectual confusion more than a common search for a modern equivalent to the old liberal education.
The attempt to avoid confusion by coming up with a new term has ironically simply created more confusion. As Conrad and Wyer point out, there has been an "unbridled diversity" in the number of curricular schemes and proposals over the past decade or so, which has led a Carnegie Commission to report that "general education is a disaster area." Fairly recently a group of individuals have attempted to salvage something from this disaster by developing what they seem to think is an even newer concept which they call
"liberating education," which has no common principle other than that
those involved should feel that the education they are involved in is
"liberating" to them.
It is appropriate that "unbridled diversity" has been identified
as the problem with general education, because to the liberal mind
diversity is nearly always good, associated with progress and the
promise of new ideas. Liberals are always willing to "entertain" 30 ideas but rarely seriously; they juggle rather than grasp them. If. for example, one proposed a reconsideration of the traditional ideal of liberal education, the liberal might well respond: "Fine, if that is liberating to you; there is certainly room for another form of liberating education." The liberal mind is difficult to struggle with, for it is a very tolerant mind that often lauds the idea of liberal education and then diminishes it by lauding everything else as well.
For example, the idea that liberal education should aid one in
developing a "connected vision" is endorsed by many educational
leaders today, but they assume that this will lead to an understanding
of how acid rain in Pennsylvania affects us here in Massachusetts, or
whether or not American force should be applied to Nicaragua. A
"connected vision" becomes an analysis of how everything relates to
everything. This is not exactly what Cardinal Newman had in mind when
he used the term over a century ago. He was thinking more along the
lines of Thomas K. Hearn when he writes, "...we must somehow recover
an enriched conception of reason which emphasizes our quest for beauty
and goodness as well as truth." Or when Hannah Arendt speaks of
"moral taste" or David Shuman of an "aesthetic sense." Yes, the
liberal mind thinks these are good as well; let us have them as well
as an understanding of how everything relates to everything on this
planet. With this kind of thinking President Charles Eliot opened the
way for the rise of the modern American university over a century ago
by dismissing arguments over what subjects should be taught by saying.
"We would have them all and at their best.''^^ 31
The primary problem with struggling against the liberal mind is that it believes there should be room for everything that we would generally consider to be good. The liberal fails to notice that in having everything, we have in turn less of each particular thing, and furthermore, while the liberal mind would seem to advocate all goods, it actually favors some things over others. It favors that which can be organized and measured over that which cannot. It favors what it thinks to be action over reflection; it favors doing over being. It is willing to choose repressive order over chaos. And it favors conformity over idiosyncracy.
Needless to say, those who identify closely with liberalism would bristle at such a portrait, but it was Lionel Trilling, a liberal, who pointed to the tendency of doctrinaire liberalism to undermine its own principles. Trilling saw a number of paradoxes in
the liberal mind. It is concerned with the emotions in that it
advocates happiness for all, but it tends to deny emotions in their
"full possibility." In the abstract the liberal mind "sets great
store by variousness and possibility," but in trying to organize the
world in such a way as to give everyone a maximum chance to experience
"variousness and possibility," it depreciates these values by
simplifying everything so as "to organize the elements of life in a
rational way." Thus, "as far as liberalism is active and positive, so
far, that is, as it moves toward organization, it tends to select the
emotions and qualities that are most susceptible to organization."
This is why I suggest the liberal mind favors conformity over 32 idiosyncracy; it is as if idiosyncracies should be kept on hold until the entire liberal organizational franiework is constructed. Of course, if there did come such a time there would be no idiosyncracies left.
The important point of Trilling's insight for our discussion is that some ideas, qualities, and characteristics fit easily within the scope and framework of the liberal mind, and others do not. Science, analysis, clear definitions, precise measurements, fit well into the liberal mind, which rose to prominence along with science. Figurative speech, profound ideas, "those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of the end of the rule,"^^ aesthetic sense, spirit, wisdom, being, the mystery of life, do not fit well, and here we begin to have a key to making sense of that which passes for liberal, or general, or liberating education these days.
An example of what I mean is provided by the contrast between
William James and John Dewey. That they have been linked under the label of pragmatism seems a great misfortune, for James was not bent on social organization and Dewey was, a difference as important as
their similarities. Thus, while Dewey could have agreed with James when he wrote: "Mind, as we actually find it, contains all sorts of
laws-"those of logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste, decorum, beauty,
morals, and so forth, as well as perception of fact,"^^ Dewey reduced
this complexity of mind by making thinking essentially a matter of
problem solving, which his followers reduced even further to life
adjustment. 33
While Trilling's humanism and liberalism lay in a delicate balance. Dewey was foremost a liberal and secondly a humanist, and his liberalism distorted his humanism. Dewey reduced the human mind to a tool for problem solving because he believed that education should be a preparation for the solving of social problems. Believing education to be the primary instrument of social change. Dewey and other liberals have proposed reforms to make education more effective along these lines, but these reforms have not adequately dealt with the chaos and powerlessness individuals experience in their own lives.
Rather than helping individuals make sense of their lives, the liberal has added the burden of responsibility for the improvement of society.
Based on a combination of simplifications, liberal proposals for educational reform either are too simplistic to be taken seriously or place such a heavy burden on the individual that the proposals should not be taken seriously. They illustrate Trilling's criticism of the liberal mind: "it unconsciously limits its view of the world to what it can deal with, and it unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to the human mind, that justify its limitation.
If I were to invent a representative of the limitations of the liberal mind at work, I could no no better than the model provided by
Harland Cleveland, Director of the Hubert Humphrey Institute for
Public Affairs. In 1981 he was a featured speaker at a national conference of higher education, and he called upon higher education to go beyond specialization to the development of "integrative brainwork" 34 necessary for enlightened citizenship. Noting that we have largely succeeded in making college education into a pathway to success open to the large majority of citi2ens--a longstanding liberal goal-he asserted that the mission of higher education should now be to produce
get-it-al1-together people." The citizen of today should have an education in "social goals, public purposes, and the ethics of citizenship, an education that offers some "practice in real-world negotiation," and "the rudimentary knowledge, the integrative tools, and...above all the concern to feel a sense of responsibility for the situation as a whole"--and he literally means the whole world. His
"get-it-al1-together" people would understand "the management of population, food, energy, and resources," that "the environment is clearly a globe as well as a local problem," and "how domestic affairs and international policy are linked."
While Cleveland does include humanities in his vision—so that one may attain "some fluency in answering the question "Who am I?"--he reflects a bias against taking much time to ponder such a question in the motivations he sees for going to college: "education as an investment (for the poor), education as a consumer product (for the affluent), education as a device for avoiding decisions about what to do next (for the unattached, uncertain, and the unemployed)." I suspect that those who went to college for leisurely, reflective studies would be cast as indecisive malingerers by Cleveland.
Where do our twentieth century individuals looking for the meaning of life fit into Cleveland's scheme? They should obviously 35 decide quickly who they are and what they want to do and join together in
organizations designed to transmute their separate expertnesses and their collective insights into wise decisions about real world problems--which are all interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, inter¬ professional and (increasingly) international. And the priceless ingredient is this: each of the participants in this complex choreography has to have some understanding of the whole scene in order to play his or her bit part in the big complexity.
Cleveland s get-it-al 1-together" people are obviously expected to find meaning in continuously getting together with others. One imagines a life of endless meetings, of incessantly integrative brainwork that will help humanity control its destiny. But nowhere in
Cleveland's vision is there room for individual destiny.
Cleveland's vision of higher education is simple-minded liberalism at its worst, including its marketplace vocabulary, its faith in group-work, its emphasis on doing and its sense of urgency that the twenty-first century is rushing towards us. In a way I am setting up a straw man in citing Cleveland, but it seems noteworthy that such people are invited to speak at national conferences of higher education, and no one raises a voice of protest against such
simple-minded visions. Perhaps this is because we tend to think that
all of this talk of purposes of higher education doesn't mean much
anyway. But then that is part of my point. While Cleveland is
inciting individuals to think in terms of controlling the world, most
of us feel we have no control over our own university, and little over
our own lives. 36
A less simple-minded example was presented at the conference the previous year by John Sawhill. President of New York University.
Rather than simply suggesting that higher education could be improved by more togetherness, Sawhill reflected upon what he would include in a general education curriculum. Like Cleveland, Sawhill asserts
students must be taught to understand their interrelatedness," but he makes more specific curricular suggestions.
He sees several areas of study as more or less "essential." For those who wish to go back to basics he offers a reinstatement of expository writing for freshman and a re-emphasis on foreign languages. To this he adds "some familiarity with one of the computer languages," while believing that students should also be
"scientifically better informed" to deal with social and ethical issues related to the "major scientific discoveries and issues of the day." He also likes interdisciplinary approaches, and praises other areas of study as well. As Sawhill continues to cite studies that
seem to be an "essential" part of his curriculum, one realizes he is
advocating just about everything and dropping nothing from the list of
essentials. It is the liberal's vision of having-it-al1 at work,
pointing in the opposite direction from his earlier contention that
each college should have a distinct identity. It also places an
enormous burden on the student who would try to follow Sawhill's
suggestions. Sawhill has been called an "avowed workaholic" and his
vision would require each student to be the same. 37
Now If we turn to Yale University, where Bartlett Giamatti is president, we might think we have finally found a university in which a traditional sense of liberal education exists, for Giamatti speaks the language of the traditionalist. Yale's
aim is not to make one technically proficient, but to instill some sense of the love of learning for its own sake, some capacity to analyze any issue as it comes along, the capacity to think and to express the results of one's thinking clearly, regardless of what the subject matter might be.
However, Mark Ryan, a dean at Yale, reveals what happens to liberal education in the competitive atmosphere of a prestigious university.
He tells us of Louise, a high achiever, who in her junior year "just got turned off" by scholarly endeavors. As Louise described her feelings which promoted her taking a year of absence: "You get all caught up in it, studying like crazy, worried about your grade point average, thinking everyone else is going to beat you for a place in law school. I guess I just got burned out." This is how Louise experienced "the love of learning for its own sake."27
While Yale may give real emphasis to the idea of the integrated curriculum, the message is the same as at other universities, if not more so: "Be a leader; scramble for success with high grades and honors; attain professional distinction." In this emphasis on competition the universities are monuments to nineteenth century rugged individualism, the spirit out of which they evolved. To counteract this competition and emphasis on the cognitive Ryan would like to give "psychological counseling" a place in the liberal arts 38 curriculum. Ryan seems to represent the position of the student personnel movement, of which Arthur Chickering is a noted spokesman, that stress the "development of the whole person." These people play particular havoc with the concept of liberal education, for they often refer to humanist psychologists like Abraham Maslow, whose "humanism" has little to do with that of the tradition of liberal education, but rather stems from their differences with behaviorists.
In terms of liberalism, the student personnel movement seems an off-shoot of the progressive education movement with its emphasis on the needs of the child extended to include older students as well.
Yale exemplifies the efforts of twentieth century progressives to ameliorate the effects of nineteenth century rugged individualism.
But, as I have already noted, this new emphasis on the affective to compensate for the liberal's long standing emphasis on the cognitive
does not in itself bring the two together, and in any event has little
to do with the traditional humanists' emphasis on integrated thought.
Ryan does not even see problems in making his affective classes
part of the competition, arguing that they too could be graded, if
"very sensitively." Among other things, the instructors could judge
the way students "verbally handle" their self-data, "the degree if not
the precise character of expressed self-insight." Are we to believe
that an instructor might fail a student for his inability to express
self-knowledge, or if not, isn't there something spurious about graded
psychotherapy?^® 39
Though Cleveland, Sawhill, Giamatti, and Ryan all make suggestions for improving liberal or general education, the direction that each would have us go so reflects the assumptions and values of liberalism and if acted upon would lead us further away from liberal education. Cleveland's vision is simplistic to the point of caricature. Sawhill's perspective, while more sophisticated, is flawed by his preoccupation with all the knowledge he thinks essential while ignoring the frenzy that his proposals make of a student's life.
While Giamatti speaks the language of humanism well, he ignores the conflict between his "love of learning" and the pressures to compete
fostered by a liberal capitalist society. Finally, while Ryan sees
how the liberal's vision actually overwhelms individual students with
the frenzy of Cleveland's incessant meetings and Sawhill's endless
studies, and the competitive pressures that undermine Giamatti's "love
of learning," his own liberal assumptions lead him to suggest a
solution which may be worse than none at all. These are some of the ways in which liberal minds attempt to improve liberal education
today, but rather than enhancing our sense of liberal education they
bury it further within the assumptions and values of liberalism, or in
Giamatti's case--fail to acknowledge how humanism is undermined by
1iberalism.
The Confused Humanist
While many liberals are critical of the current state of liberal
or general education, their criticisms either emphasize the failure of 40 higher education to develop sufficiently enlightened citizens
(Cleveland) or to attend to the psychological "needs" of students
(Ryan). In both cases their criticisms lead us away from a revitalization of traditional liberal education concerned with our
Western cultural heritage, though they obscure this by making their
proposals seem compatible with traditional liberal education. The
problem is further complicated by the fact that in our liberal society
most humanists share many of the assumptions and values of liberalism,
and seem unclear themselves whether they are essentially humanists or
liberals vis-a-vis education. And even humanists who are aware of the
distinctions between liberalism and humanism, often state their views
in terms calculated to influence the liberal mind, minimizing whatever
may seem elitist, impractical, or archaic in their thought. Since few
people are aware of the conflict between the values of liberalism and
those of liberal education, humanists themselves become confused by
the intellectual muddle made of the two liberal traditions.
This muddle is unintentionally illustrated by Adel Simnons,
President of Hampshire College. In "Harvard Flunks a Test," Simmons
seems a traditional humanist one moment and a progressive liberal the
next. Simmons sounds like a traditional humanist in criticizing the
attention that Harvard's latest "core curriculum" has received, noting
that it is not a core curriculum shared by all undergraduates but
instead an individually selected group of eight courses from a total
of one hundred divided into eight areas. Simnons supports her own
contention by quoting the traditionalist, Mortimer Adler, to the point 41 that Harvard's core curriculum "can hardly be defended as a restoration of the truly general education."
However, when Simmons presents her own vision it is obviously not that of a traditional humanist, but instead a combination of
Cleveland's and Sawhill's.
I believe that today's undergraduates will need an unprecedented breadth of knowledge and richness of imagination. The technical and moral subtleties of the decisions they will face can leave one defense¬ less before the temptation to renounce personal responsibi 1 i ty... (and)...the complexity of social and environmental issues (to give two examples only) dictates interdisciplinary attempts to solve them and underscores the value of interdisciplinary training.
But then Simmons again seems a traditionalist by crediting St.
John's with establishing the modern prototype of the core curriculum, mentioning the success of Robert Hutchins in developing a core
curriculum at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. She seems
unaware that Chicago's core curriculum was not what Hutchins and Adler
had wanted, which is why St. John's came into being. She also seems
unaware that the philosophy underlying St. John's core curriculum
directly contradicts her belief that colleges today must give students
an unprecedented amount of knowledge. Rather than an "unprecedented
breadth of knowledge," St. John's concentrates on a selection of great
works aimed at developing the "arts of understanding."29
Simmons' paper is a muddle of ideas, resulting from either a
superficial understanding of the history of liberal education or a
willingness to minimize her differences with traditionalists in order 42 to have greater influence. Simmons seems resentful of the attention that prestigious universities like Harvard and Yale receive for their ineffective efforts to develop a general education, while the more serious efforts of small colleges like Hampshire and St. John's are largely ignored. However, in portraying St. John's as an ally in the struggle for a true general education, she implies a false similarity
in vision between the two colleges that adds to our confusion.^^
Many traditionalists also seem willing to minimize their differences with progressives for the purpose of greater influence.
Mortimer Adler, for example, is clearly aware of these differences, but in his recent Paideia Proposal he ignores them. Adler proposes a
prescribed curriculum for undergraduates divided into three areas:
acquisition of organized knowledge; development of "intellectual
ski 11 s~-ski 11 s of learning"; and an enlarged understanding of ideas
and values. These proposals seem a combination of traditionalist and
progressive ideas.
Reflecting the spirit of compromise, the booklet is dedicated to
Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Robert Hutchins "who would have been our
leaders if they were alive today.As Adler knows, if Dewey and
Hutchins were still our "leaders" today, they would most likely lead
in opposite directions. Dewey's thought led to problem-solving
curriculums tailored to the individual student at colleges such as
Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and Hampshire, in which "integration is
something to be sought in the individual student, not in the
curriculum." In contrast, St. John's Reflects the position of 43
Hutchins and Adler, with its prescribed curriculum centered upon the great works of Western civilization.
The proposal is sufficiently vague to allow progressives such as
Simmons' their own versions. However, when Adler asserts that we have known for a long time what the best education is and have simply failed to implement it, his version of the "best education" differs significantly from that of Simmons'. Adler's position is essentially the same as it was in the 1930s, when he argued vehemently against the application of Dewey's "progressive" thought to liberal education, and
Simmons' position is along the lines of Dewey. But Adler enraged many people at that time and he has since learned to be more tactful in expressing his views, though at the loss of drawing clear distinctions between his views and those of progressives. The Proposal obscures the conflict between the two positions, reading like a party platform worked out through compromise with an eye to what will sway the public.
Simmons' apparent lack of awareness of the history of liberal education and Adler's willingness to make vague the traditionalist position illustrate two sources of our present confusion regarding liberal education. A third source lies in the liberal's continued attempts to reconstruct the concept of liberal education to better fit liberalism, a tendency reflected in Sinmons' article but even better illustrated by Zelda Gamson's study. Liberating Education. Responding to the pronouncement of the Carnegie Commission in 1977 that the state of general education was a "disaster area," Gamson began her own 44
search for a unifying principle for general education detailed in this book. Of particular interest to our discussion is a roundtable
discussion among Gamson and a "commission" of seven people
representing "different sectors of higher education" on the question:
What should liberal education mean?^^ Though the discussion is largely
shaped by the values and assumptions of liberalism rather than liberal
education, one of the members, Roland Braithwaite, seems to view the
matter more from a humanist than a liberal perspective. His
interchanges with other members of the commission illustrate how the
contemporary humanist is tripped up by liberal assumptions and
values—including his own.
Braithwaite's own liberalism is apparent early in the discussion
when he supports his belief that liberal education is important by
citing that studies have shown "college educated people, compared to
people with less education, are most likely to support civil
liberties, dues process, and freedom from arbitrary laws; they want
less protection from controversial ideas. They are also more in favor
of equality and humanitarianism"--in other words, they become
committed to liberalism.^^
Though a liberal, Braithwaite seems to view liberal education
more from a humanist perspective. He seems least in favor of the
contemporary liberal assumption that minorities and others deemed
disadvantaged should have an education particularly tailored to their
unique needs. This is interesting because Braithwaite is a Black
professor teaching at a Black college, whose students have a poor 45 background in the skills of speaking and reading. Though one of the white liberals asserts the need of an education fitted to the
realities of people who are very different" than the "middle-class, white, male, Braithwaite emphasizes an understanding of Western cultural heritage as the primary aim of a liberal education.
Unfortunately, he supports this contention with the kind of practical calculation that characterizes the liberal mind, but which is demeaning to his original assertion. He argues that Blacks have "to learn to compete in a European system of standards, deal with the
Western world and improve their condition in the majority society."
Rather than a source of personal enrichment the study of cultural heritage seems like a tool for dealing with a predominantly white society. But I do not think he means that, for he adds: "We want our
students to learn the ideas of the tradition and carry them out at their best." This seems to indicate an appreciation of Western cultural heritage, but Braithwaite is trapped within the liberal mind,
too quick to argue on the basis of the practical and the realistic, even though he values the tradition for its own sake.^^
With Braithwaite apparently not quite clear in his own mind
which of his educational values is most important to him, he is swept
along by the liberal consensus which ignores his emphasis on cultural
heritage and instead stresses the idea of "empowerment," empowerment,
for example, "for people who have felt dumb or put down all their
lives." Earlier another member of the commission had talked about the
value of women's studies in this regard, and Braithwaite responded 46 that it sounded like she was talking about "indoctrination-the very opposite of what a liberal education should be." But the rest of the commission seems attracted to the notion of empowerment, so
Braithwaite only adds the qualification that liberal education is
"moral to the core, without indoctrination."^^
The commission ends the discussion with one member asserting that they need a new term for the education they have in mind, and someone suggests "liberating education," an education for critical awareness, use, which can lead to empowerment. Most of the group seem to believe that if individuals become aware of all that limits them, they will be on the pathway to freedom (empowerment). However, I suspect that Braithwaite understands that this negative sense of freedom is but half of the issue, that the concept of freedom also requires a positive content which he and other humanists point to with the idea of culture. Perhaps he also senses that while "liberating education" seems to imply a unifying principle, it actually encourages unbridled diversity since it is "whatever is liberating at a particular moment in time."^^ I suspect Braithwaite is not quite sure himself how his own view differs from that of the others, for it is lost within the liberal consensus which allows him to have his own idea of "liberating education" while failing to take seriously his humanist concerns.
Brai thwai te's position within the commission seems to reflect the position of humanists in general within higher education. We can
imagine how confused humanists, such as Braithwaite, must get as they 47 attend conferences in which Cleveland talks about "getting-it-all- together," and Sawhill provides more and more "essential" subjects for their students to study, and Giamatti talks about the "love of learning," while the less rugged of their students burn out through the competition. Perhaps humanists will also feel the need for new courses psycho-therapizing their own students, or confuse Adele
Simmons as one who shares their views, or be further confused by the progressive language in the progressive-traditionalist Paideia
Proposal. And then when they sit down with others also interested in liberal education to discuss what it might be today, they soon find that they too are thinking in terms of liberating education, though it does not quite seem to fit with their own emphasis on cultural heritage. This is what it is like for humanists to try to think and talk about liberal education these days.
Perhaps the commission's separation of liberating education from liberal education is a good sign, for it might make it easier for those of us still interested in liberal education to revitalize the old concept. However, to really be able to do so, we must understand the tradition in its historical context, and how in the American context the concept was first distorted by Puritan orthodoxy and then
freed from this orthodoxy by liberalism only to become distorted again
by the liberal ideology. 48
A Gap in the Literature
While there are scattered allusions to the incursion of liberal thought into higher education throughout the general histories on this subject, there is no extensive study relating the rise of liberalism to the decline of the traditional concept of liberal education and our current confusion over the subject. This seems due to the uncritical perspective from which the major historians of education (Butts,
Cremin, Rudolph, & Veysey) have viewed this history. Their histories tend to reflect a neo-enlightenment world view combined with a progressive temper to produce a liberal humanitarianism, a view which has dominated American social, intellectual, and political life for over half a century.^®
From this point of view the history of higher education has essentially been one of progress. It is the story of a higher education increasingly fashioned to meet "the needs of individuals and society," rejecting elitism and providing a means for a meritocracy, a story of the growth of knowledge and the growing accessibility of a college education to all. While the loss of the traditional sense of liberal education is alluded to with lament, it is a sub-plot in a
story of progress. For example, Rudolph notes that the elective
principle "almost obliterated the humanist content of higher education
and substituted for it an often excessive concern with practical power
and the equality of men," but he essentially negates this criticism by
concluding that this same principle "moved the American college and
university into the mainstream of American life, where it had long 49 been sorely needed and where it for long sorely needed to be." Thus, the impression one receives is that the general direction of higher education has been essentially good and inevitable, and, although it has created problems in overspecialization, they are surmountable.
Thus, Rudolph ends his The American College and University with what seems to be an upbeat note describing the American consensus:
Every American was free to write his own definition of both knowledge and enrichment, but no definition would avoid a fundamental attachment to the American consensus: "Let knowledge grow from more to more, and thus be human life enriched.
Rudolph's "American consensus" suits our liberal ideology but is not consistent with liberal education. Our individualism, egalitarianism, and preoccupation with new knowledge have created conditions hostile to a liberal education. Overspecializing is a result of the high value that liberals have traditionally placed upon scientific expertise and their willingness to reduce higher education to a vehicle for individual success in order to bring it into the mainstream of American life. Welcoming the success of liberalism in
higher education, the liberal historians have taken little notice of
how our present problem with general education is a result of this
triumph. I admit these historians are not specifically concerned with the
concept of liberal education, and that is part of the problem. Even
revisionists such as Clarence Karier and Walter Feinberg are not
particularly interested in liberal education. While they add a
critical perspective on the effect of liberal assumptions on 50 educational development, their interest is primarily in the disparity between what liberalism promises and has to date attained. They, like
the liberals they critique, are concerned with the broad relation
between education and society, rather than in the specifics of a
liberal education offered in a given classroom or school. Though
Karier is quite conscious of the history of traditional liberal
education, Feinberg reveals an alarming ignorance when he uses
"progressive education" synonomously with "liberal education."^®
Feinberg's mistake suggests the partial success of the
progressives to promote their own view of liberal education. Since
Dewey's reconstruction of both liberalism and liberal education, the
progressives have tried to replace the traditional sense with their
own, portraying the traditional sense as elitist, archaic, and
impractical. In their efforts to promote their own views they have
not bothered to distinguish them from traditional notions of liberal
education. Thus, they are the least likely to analyze the
contemporary confusion over the concept; instead they tend to blame
our half-hearted attempts at liberal education on the "conservative
nature and plain obstinacy of some faculty.
If we turn to the traditionalists (Van Doren, Barzun, Foerster,
Adler, Babbit) we do get insight into the tradition of liberal
education and the problems it has faced in this century, but
traditionalists focus on specific villains such as modernism,
scientism, humanitarianism, or progressivism rather than relating all
of these to liberalism, of which they are aspects. They rightfully 51 believe that liberal education must be adapted to present circumstances, but disagree on the nature of adaptation, and nearly always the adaptation requires an acceptance of some liberal assumptions. Thus, traditional views have all too often been liberalized, further blurring the distinction between liberalism and humanism. It is difficult to know which of these adjustments to liberalism have come about through changes in philosophical outlook and which have been prompted by pragmatic realism. In order to remain at the center of educational debate in this century one has had to identify one's educational philosophy with the "true" liberalism, and deny that one was simply being conservative.^^
Another important problem with traditionalist accounts of liberal education is that in their effort to defend the ideal they have given little recognition to how poorly this ideal has been realized in this country's history. Thus, while the progressive ignores the past history of liberal education as archaic, the traditionalist also tends to ignore this history by idealizing it, and adds to our confusion by not acknowledging the validity of the
liberal's criticism of its actual practice.
Each attempt at telling the story of liberal education in our
century leaves out important aspects which are needed to understand
the path towards our present confusion. Integrating the insights of
these various works requires supplemental study of the mind-sets of
Puritanism, liberalism, and humanism. 52
Summary
In this chapter I have outlined both the possibilities for a meaningful education inherent in the ideal of liberal education and the primary obstacle to fruitful thought about these possibilities— the confusion of liberal education with an education in liberalism. I began by describing how traditional ways of making sense of the world have broken down and then suggested ways in which the humanist tradition of liberal education can contribute to our making sense of things. This is not possible, however, as long as we continue to confuse liberal education with liberalism education. I supported this contention by describing the nature of discussions these days about liberal education, showing that these discussions are conducted largely from the perspective of the liberal ideology making it very difficult for a humanist to be heard or even to think clearly about the issue. Finally, I discussed the nature of historical discussions on the subject suggesting that the central reason that these accounts have not shed much light upon our confusion is that none of them examine the relationship between the rise of liberalism and the" decline of liberal education. Altogether, this chapter has been a description of the nature of our confusion of liberal education with liberalism, which in turn has undermined the contribution that liberal education can make to our search for meaning.
The next four chapters will be devoted to an examination of the path towards our present confusion. We will begin by examining the
Greek roots of liberal education in order to develop a sense of its 53 original spirit and meaning. We will then note how the spirit and meaning changed as the concept was passed along from the Romans to the
Christian scholastics, then to the Renaissance humanists, and finally to the Puritans who established higher education in this country and to the liberals who now control it. 54
FOOTNOTES
^Michael Denneny, "The Privilege of Ourselves," in Melvyn A. Hill (Ed.), Hannah Arendt; The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 266-261; Wil 1 iam Barrett, The Illusion of Technique (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 197^17 pp. 121-146. o ^Denney, op. cit., pp. 257-258.
^Barrett, op. cit., pp. 230-232, 174-176. The philosophers Barrett is referring to are analytic philosophers, who predominate in American philosophy departments. Continental philsophers, such as Heidegger, are concerned with the question of meaning. A survey of how analytic philosophers view continental philosophers can be gained from Richard Party, "Philosophy in America Today," The American Scholar, Winter, 1973/79.
^Hannah Arendt, The Life at the (Volune One) Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), p. 1^. ~~~
^As quoted in R. S. Peters, "Michael Oakeshott's Philosophy of Education," in Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Eds.), Politics and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 47.
^Werner Jaeger, Humanism and Theology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1945), pp. 20-2i.
^Arendt, op. cit., pp. 165-166.
®J. Glenn Gray, "The Winds of Thought," Social Research, Summer, 1977.
^Arendt, op. cit., pp. 14-15.
^^Gray, op. cit., p. 50. l^Alfred North Whitehead, "The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline," The Aims of Education (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 30. ^^Clifton F. Conrad and Jean C. Wyer, Liberal Education in Transition, Research Report No. 3 (Washington; American Association for Higher Education, 1980), p. 1.
l^Diane Ravitch as quoted in David Schuman, PolJcj!_Analfi^ Education, and Everyday Life: An Empirical Reevaluation oyjgher Education in America (Lexington, m: D. C. Heath, 19bi;), p. aaI. 55
14 Adele Simmons, "Harvard Flunks a Test," Harper's. March 1979, p. 26. 15 Hannah Arendt, Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture " Social Research. Fall 1971, p. 421. Lecture,
values reflects the marketplace mentality O' liberal, for value "always means value in exchange," In contrast, the intrinsic worth of something is independent of its value in the marketplace. To think in terms of values demeans our sense of the word worth." See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicaao* University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 133-166.-
DK-i Educology of the Free (New York: Philosophical Library, 1981), p.niT - 18 As quoted in Russell Thomas, The Search for a Common Learning: General Education, 1800-1960 (New Yorirr“McGr^vv-Hi 11, 1962), p. 2.—
^^"General education--was not so much a synonym for liberal education as it was a way of organizing it," according to John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1976 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 272. on As quoted in Brubacher and Rudy, p. 11. pi Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking Press, 1950), pp. ix-xv. pp ^‘^Ibid., p. XV.
^^As quoted in Jacque Barzun, A Stroll with William James (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 23, 282-283. P4 ‘^ Trilling, op. cit., p. xiii.
^^Harland Cleveland, "What is 'Higher' About Higher Education," 1981, Current Issues in Higher Education, No. 2 (Washington: American Association for Higher Education, 1981), pp. 1-4. Cleveland presented this paper to the 1981 National Conference on Higher Education, March 4-6, in Washington, D.C.
^^John c. Sawhill, "Higher Education in the 80's: Beyond Retrenchment," Current Issues in Higher Education, 1980 (Washington: Americna Association for Higher Education, 1980).
^^Mark Ryan, "Doldrums in the Ivies: A Proposal for Restoring Self-Knowledge to a Liberal Education," Change, Vol. 12, No. 8, November-December, 1980, p. 34. 56
28 Ibid., p. 38.
John's College: Statement of the St. John'*; Program 1983-84 pp. 6-7. ----2- 30 Simmons, op. cit., pp. 20-27. 31 Mortimer Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto (New York: MacMillan, 1982), pp. zi-iZ. Though authored by Adler, the proposal was apparently developed by a group of twenty-two educators, including Adele Simmons and Jacques Barzun. 32 Ibid., p. V. 33 Zelda F. Gamson and Associates, Liberating Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1984), pp. 10-11.
^^Ibid., pp. 13-14.
^^Ibid., p. 21.
^^Ibid., pp. 22 and 26. 37 Ibid., p. 218. This insight into liberating education is provided by David Riesman in an "Afterword" to the book. He cautions that the "widespread emphasis on empowerment...is a bit too over¬ generalized," p. 225.
^^Clarence Karier, "American Educational History: A Perspective," a paper presented at the Southeastern Regional Meeting, History of Education Society, Atlanta, Georgia, November, 1971. While Karier only mentions Lawrence Crenin, the liberal humanitarian view is also reflected in the histories of higher education written by R. Freeman Butts, Frederick Rudolph, and Laurence Veysey.
^^Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A Hi story (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 306 and 482.
^^Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of 20th Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), p. '2^8; Clarence Kasier's doctoral dissertation was on the New Humanists, e.g. Irwing Babbitt and Norman Foerster.
^^itnnons, op. cit., p. 26.
^^Rather than criticize liberalism, traditionalists have argued that progressives have preached a false liberalism. See Mortimer Adler, "Liberalism and Liberal Education." The Educational Record, July 1*939, 422-436; Norman Foerster, in I.L. Kandel (Ed.). Educational Yearbook *of the International Institute of Teachers College Colum^ University (New York: Columbia University, 1939), pp. 333-3437 CHAPTER II
THE GREEK SPIRIT OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
Among the Greeks, then, we find this boundless impulse of individuals to display themselves, and to find their enjoyment in so doing. Hegel
The tradition of liberal education has two primary elements, that which has given it form and that which has given it life. The form was clarified as the seven liberal arts by the Romans in the third or fourth century A.D., and though changing over the centuries has continuously given shape to the idea of liberal education. This form stemmed from the admiration the Romans had for the Greek culture and was their attempt to emulate it through formal education.
Breathing life into this form, has been the spirit of ancient Greece, or more accurately, our recurring tendency to cast our mind's eye back to ancient Greece for inspiration. Liberal education is more than a given curriculum; it is a way of teaching and learning, of, in fact, living with the ideals of the Greeks. There have, of course, been times in which the liberal arts were
taught in ways that seem totally out of keeping with the Hellenic spirit, most notably the Reformation. When v/e look at the Puritan's
teaching of the liberal arts, firmly based on Reformation experience,
we sense that it is not quite right to call it a liberal education
57 58
because the spirit that infuses it is so different from that of the
Greeks. Such uneasiness is particularly evident in the history of
American education because Puritans started liberal education in this
country, and their restrictive influence dominated in the early part
of our history. Later, when liberals reacted against such
restrictiveness they presented themselves as advocates of a "true
liberal education, while, in fact, they were not primarily concerned
with revitalizing liberal education but rather with developing a new
education in keeping with their own particular vision of progress.
In order not to confuse the Greek spirit with that of the
Puritan or the liberal, in this chapter I will describe this spirit
relying primarily on the work of Hannah Arendt and Werner Jaeger. I will outline what I believe to be the essential elements of Greek life
in which that spirit dwelled, partly by contrasting the Greek view of
life with our own, and discuss the relationship between the spirit of
liberal education and its formal elements, as well as between the
liberal arts and systematic philosophy. Those tensions, problematic
as they are, are an inherent part of the tradition of liberal
education.
Interpreting the Hellenic Spirit
Every selection of material in a sense interferes with history, and all criteria for selection puts this historical course of events under certain man¬ made conditions. Hannah Arendt 59
Lionel Thrilling pointed out, "every Greece is different from every other, each being shaped for a particular purpose."^ In John
Dewey's Greece, for example, the Greek spirit is essentially
scientific in nature, moved along by the spirit of free inquiry and experimentation. In my Greece there is an emphasis on free inquiry as well, though I do not give this scientific bent the centrality that
Dewey does. A few years ago an advocate of vocational education
argued that Greek education was essentially utilitarian in nature for
it gave individuals the skills necessary in politics. It is this
tendency that we all have to construe the essence of the Greek spirit
to accord with our own purposes that suggests how the Puritans too
could find inspiration in the Greeks, despite their obvious
differences in outlook.
Therefore, before I describe the Hellenic spirit, let us admit
that within the parameters of factual evidence this Hellenic Spirit is
a synthesis we each make of the Greek elements that inspire us. While
there are similarities in each version, there are also differences
depending upon our biases. For this reason I state frankly that the
following is my interpretation of the spirit of ancient Greece, even
though it is largely based on the interpretation of others whose
knowledge of the subject far exceeds my own.
Most interpretations, including my own, focus very narrowly on
one small part of Greece. Except for certain moments of heroism our
Greece is not Sparta, nor the other cities of Greece except when we
can find something extraordinary, such as Ionian science. Our Greece 60 is essentially Athens, and especially Athens of the Periclean age, except for philosophy, which rises as Athens declines. And within
Athens, we are certainly imagining the life of the perhaps 20,000 male citizens and not the rest, and, at least for me, ultimately there is that one citizen, philosopher, soldier who represents the true Greece, as those citizens who condemned him to death do not. As we see, there
is a great deal of selection that takes place immediately in our discerning the true Greece and the Hellenic spirit.
Most interpretations also emphasize the Greek (Athenian) pursuit
of excellence ("to be of one's best and to be the best of all"), the
pursuit of truth through reason, the centrality of politics in
everyday life, and a sense of beauty that permeated all things and
endeavors, so that the motive for excellence could be described as the
desire "to take possession of the beautiful."^ Some version of this
description of the Hellenic spirit is usually given by educators as
the basis of a liberal education.
The problem with the description as a basis for liberal
education is its potential for varying interpretations. In using any
of these terms, such as "excellence," "politics," or "freedom," we are
encumbered by the present day meanings of these words derived from
American life. What we need to do is to find a way of remaining ever
conscious of the fact that in speaking of the ancient Greeks, the
founders of the Bay Colony, and ourselves that we are speaking of
three different worlds and each world used a different language. 61
Compare for a moment our way of life with that of the Greeks.
While our society centers upon business, Greek society centered upon politics, a "politics" whose meaning differs from our own sense of the term. Since business is central to our lives, many of our words are at least partially colored by the image of the marketplace. Harland
Cleveland, mentioned in the last chapter, uses metaphors and examples drawn from business because the image of the marketplace is in the foreground of his thought. However, even when we are further removed from the marketplace than Cleveland, the meanings of words such as politics, excellence, or freedom are colored by the assumptions of the marketplace.
For example, in the introduction to this dissertation I referred
to the "marketplace of ideas," in which the truth is supposed to win
out over time. This assumption reflects our positive sense of open
competition, in which the best or most worthwhile wins. This is a
central myth in our lives and shades the meanings of other important
words. In terms of education, in addition to the high-minded view of
the marketplace of ideas there is the lower-minded concern with the
marketability of the skills one learns. In its most benign
interpretation the metaphor of the marketplace conveys a sense of the
triumph of the most deserving. While some will deny this and point
out that many others are at a disadvantage in the marketplace because
of their race or sex, they rarely challenge the idea of the
marketplace itself but only its living up to its promise. Their
response to the problem is usually some form of affirmative action. 62 programs like "Headstart" designed to help the disadvantaged to find
an equal place at the starting line in the great race towards success.
All of this is but to suggest that as framed by the marketplace we think of life largely in terms of success or failure within the
standards of the marketplace. Our sense of the word "freedom" is
similarly colored by the marketplace, a freedom which is essentially
the opportunity to succeed economically. To understand the
marketplace, its myths and its inconsistencies, and our reaction to
them is to understand much about our way of life. However, our image
of the marketplace obscures our sense of the Greeks, because it was
not a part of their culture. Consequently, words like "freedom,"
"politics," and "excellence" had distinctly different meanings in
Greek life than they do in our own.
The center of Greek life was not business but politics, and for
them the illuminating metaphor is the polis rather than the
marketplace. While the youths in our society grow up wondering how
they will find a place in the marketplace, the Greek youths who were
free to be citizens were concerned with eventually winning distinction
among their peers. Rather than a place for making deals, the polis
was, as Hannah Arendt describes, the "space of appearances" organized
"out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between
people living together, no matter where they happen to be."^ It was
here that the Greek fulfilled "the need, not of mere pleasure, but of
the display of individual powers, in order thereby to gain distinction
and consequent enjoyment," according to Hegel. The ultimate goal was 63 to win imperishable fame, or immortality, to become a story passed through the ages.
This basic difference in orientation between the Greeks and ourselves leads to numerous other differences as well. As success is
determined by economics in our society, the fame sought by the Greeks
related to the idea of arete, or excellence, which Werner Jaeger has
called "the central ideal of all Greek culture."^ To the Greeks all
things and human endeavors had a specific form of excellence, for
example an arete for each art form, an arete for a particular age of
life, an arete for a man and for a woman, and, most importantly, a
civil or political arete. This last was called eupraxia and it meant
"action well done." This distinction did not hinge upon success, as
it does for us, but upon the quality of conduct itself, who one
revealed oneself to be through the action. As an example Hannah
Arendt writes, "man, if compelled to fight, is still free to fight
bravely or in a cowardly way," and it was the way in which one fought
that was most important, not that one won. We know of Achilles to
this day, not because he won battles, but because he chose to avenge
the death of a friend, knowing beforehand that his action would cause
his own death as well.^
That the actions of the warrior were considered political
suggests a sense of politics that is both different and broader than
our own. Literally all that happened within this "space of
appearances" was political, meaning that political referred to all of
the shared aspects of the Greek citizens' lives. It is helpful here 64 to note that when Hegel writes of the "boundless impulse of individuals to display themselves," that the self being displayed was not an independent personality, as we would assume in our more individualistic times, but "the ideal that inspires us."^ The self being displayed was the individual's response to the arete and in
"striving to do one's best and to be the best of all," one confirmed the shared ideals of the polis.
While our own sense of politics stems from that of the Greeks, it has become so colored by the attitude of the marketplace that though our politicians refer to ideals in their speeches, we perceive their policies and actions as negotiations and deals. As voters we are concerned with getting "a piece of the political pie," and any mention of deals makes us shrug our shoulders and say "its all politics," meaning that we can ignore the public statements as posturing since we know the issue is being decided by behind-the- scenes manipulations. Rather than images of the marketplace, the Greeks used metaphors of the performing arts, such as dancing, healing, and flute playing to describe political activities. As with the performing arts the excellence of a political act was a matter of virtuosity, which was to be found in the performance itself and not "an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence." In that the action itself is short lived, acting individuals, like play actors, need a publicly organized space for their "work," and the "presence of others before whom they can appear."^ 65
Their sense of freedom is as different from ours as are the ends of the polis and the marketplace. Our freedom of the marketplace is the freedom to make deals, to acquire objects and skills which will increase our value in the marketplace; over time this is our path to success. As Tocqueville observed, this freedom, rather than being political, is a freedom from politics, from the public life, the freedom to devote oneself to individual pursuits. Also, this freedom of economic opportunity focuses upon future possibilities rather than the present moment; it is a freedom from restraints and a freedom as potential. In contrast, as suggested by the term "virtuosity," the
Greek freedom is of the present moment, the freedom to perform well now. As Hannah Arendt writes, "Men are free...as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to ^ free and to act are the same."®
Thus, free action, actualization of the ideal, and virtuosity, are different ways to refer to the same performance of excellence.
From the actor's point of view what particularly distinguishes this free action is that it does not come from internal motivation, but springs from principles, such as honor, or glory, or love of truth, which "inspire, as it were, from without."^ For the Greek hero, this inspiration was so great that he disregarded the dangerous consequences of his action. As exemplified by Achilles, he "despised danger in comparison with disgrace.
Altogether, the Greek sense of free action suggests an action inspired by a principle and performed with a disregard of consequences. While I have cited Arhilles, it was not only in war 66 that such virtuosity could appear. An equally good example is the performance of Socrates at his trial. In reading Plato's description of Socrates' defense one feels one is witnessing a man free from fear and acting solely upon principle - in this case the love of truth.
Though his life is in the hands of his judges, rather than trying to curry favor with them he virtually insults them with the suggestion that it is only the dislike of others that has put him on trial.
Knowing that he is not helping his own position, he states to the judges:
You are wrong my friend, if you think a man with a spark of decency in him ought to calculate life or death; the only thing he ought to consider, if he does anything, is whether he does right or wrong.
Such was the moral heroism of eupraxia, and it was around such actions that the life of the polis centered, where the "raison d'etre would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear.
Such moral heroism was considered the highest form of arete, and it is central to our sense of the Hellenic spirit, but not a complete description. Any number of fanatics, after all, have an uncompromising sense of right and wrong, and what distinguishes the
Greek spirit from that of the fanatic is the Greek's extraordinary capacity for making distinctions. Nearly all the words we use to differentiate branches of knowledge and activities, e.g., chemistry,
theology, politics, comedy, aesthetics, etc., are Greek in origin, and 67 this drawing of distinctions is arguably the intellectual act most characteristic of the Greeks.
We have carried the Greek art of making distinctions to the point of separating reason from emotion and ethics from aesthetics, while for them these distinctions also assumed connections. Virtue,
excellence, and beauty were woven together in the Greek view, which is why arete at times signifies virtue more than excellence, and why it
could be said that the aim of arete "is to take possession of the
beautiful." There was not a clear line drawn between ethics and
aesthetics because the good was thought of in terms of the excellent
and the excellent was thought of in terms of beautiful.
This tendency to think and speak in terms of the beautiful is
well illustrated in the Symposium. Alcibiades praises the beautiful
soul of Socrates, whom Alcibiades thinks most able to help him "attain
the height of excellence." Socrates responds:
If what you say is true about me...and if there is in me some power which can make you better, you must see some inconceivable beauty in me immensely greater than your own loveliness.^^
Here virtue, excellence, and beauty mirror each other and provide a
viewpoint from which can be seen "every part as subordinate and
relative to an ideal whole" {Jaeger).The problem of doing right
was not a matter of the will but a matter of knowledge, a knowledge of
the beautiful, and it was the beauty of virtue which moved one to be
virtuous. 68
The formal studies of Greek youths reflect this emphasis on aesthetics. Music, gymnastics, and epic poetry formed the curriculum, giving the youth a sense of beautiful sounds, beautiful forms, and beautiful deeds. This was the preparation for the way of life of the free man, free to devote himself to the beautiful. The "liberal" of liberal education refers to the pursuits worthy of this free man and the quality of liberality, or generosity with one's possessions, which characterized the free man's spirit, though the Greeks themselves did not think in terms of liberal education per se. The concept of liberal education as study of the liberal arts was conceived by the
Romans Yarro and Cicero as a way of emulating the Greek way of life through formal education. The Greek word "paideia" denotes education, culture, and the ideal altogether.
Paideia was particularly the ideal pursued in daily life. In the Symposium a youth is advised "to love one body and there beget beautiful speech" and "from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from bodies to beautiful pursuits and practices, and from practices to beautiful learnings, so that from learnings...he may know at last that which is the perfection of all beauty.As the youth becomes a young man he is advised to spend his time in the company of those whose knowledge of the beautiful is most complete, which is why we imagine Socrates accompanied by numerous young men, including
Plato, Xenophone, and Alcibiades. When Leo Strauss writes, "Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful," he is in
accord with the Hellenic spirit.^^ 69
However, the Greek spirit has not been simply a matter of aesthetics. The analysis that we are now doing is also a legacy of
Greece -- its greatest contribution being reason and the idea that mankind could be rational. To the rhapsody of spirit unified and moved by beauty to pursue excellence, we must add the divergent note of reason. As Auden has suggested, the Greeks were the first "to think about our thinking, to ask such questions as "What do I think?"^® And it is Socrates who is credited with asking this question most persistently both of himself and others, and, in so doing initiating the individual conscience.
I have argued that Greek individuality was a reflection of group
ideals, and thus the opposite of our notion of individual ism.
Socrates initiated philosophic individualism. Earlier we noted a
similar heroism between Achilles and Socrates, but there is also a
very significant difference. Achilles' sense of right followed
traditional values while Socrates reasoned his way to a sense of
right. As Jaeger has stated, the Homeric man "measured his own arete
by the opinion which others held of him. Yet the philosophic man of
later times could dispense with such external recognition."^^ There is
no reason to believe that Socrates was indifferent to the attraction
of enduring fame that moved his fellow Greeks, only that he found
living in harmony with himself to be even more important than the
praise of his fellow citizens, especially since their opinions did not
seem well thought out. 70
Rationality was the crowning glory of the Greek spirit, but it emerged only as Athens was declining. Educational consciousness, as developed by the sophists, and individual conscience, as developed by
Socrates, came about as the nature of Athenian life was changing and
traditional standards were breaking down. That theories on the
pursuit of arete were first developed during this period indicates, I
suspect, that the paideia of the Greek way of life was no longer
adequate to teach arete. Nietzsche at least finds that "the summer of
Greece" occurred before reason evolved.
In Socrates, however, there does seem that momentary balance
between the traditional unity and the new individualism, in which
excellence, beauty, and reason all are prized. In Socrates we seem to
have found the civilized man in whom unity and diversity exist without
strain. His individualism is not a denial of shared ideals but his
own assessment of what they mean. Early in his life Socrates turned
away from Ionian science since he could not find any illumination into
the ultimate purpose of human life. While most things we do are the
means to ends, Socrates asked what is the ultimate end which is not a
means to something else but which is an end itself. It is this sense
of ultimate purpose that underlies the idea of "liberal pursuits that
Aristotle will later describe as ends in themselves.
The image of Socrates is one of irony and paradox. In fact, one
wonders if Socrates taught Plato the meaning of irony. Here in this
world which so emphasized the beauty of the senses, we find the most
beautiful of souls in an ugly body. We find the individual who is 71 most commonly held up as the Ideal teacher to be one who claimed to know nothing and to have nothing to teach. And perhaps most Ironic is that he who died in disgrace in the eyes of his fellow citizens should become arguably the most immortal of the Greeks, the individual whose fame seems least likely to perish.
The Spirit and Form of Liberal Education
Just as others are pleased by a good horse or dog or bird, I myself am pleased in an even higher degree by good friends....And the treasures of the wise men of old which they left behind by writing them in books, I unfold and go through them together with my friends, and if we see something good, we pick it out and regard it as a great gain if we thus become useful to one another. Socrates
At the beginning of this chapter I distinguished between the spirit of liberal education and its form. When considering Socrates and liberal education there is a corresponding distinction between seeing Socrates as the inspiration of our idea of liberal education on the one hand and understanding Socrates' role in the formalization of liberal education on the other. The spirit of Greece is a combination of excellence, beauty, and reason, but in the legacy of Greece reason has come to dominate, particularly in the form of scholarship. But reason as scholarship is not well suited to grasp the spirit that gave rise to it, the spirit of Socrates and Athens. This is simply because scholarship is based on analysis, a breaking into parts, while spirit must be captured as whole. It seems that the better we are at 72
breaKIng something down Into parts, and the better we can define these
parts - I.e., the clearer our formal knowledge - the further removed
we are from the overall spirit. This d11enr,a has been pointed out by
Jacques Bartun In an article describing why our contemporary
university with Its emphasis on scholarship Is particularly unsuited
for an education In culture, the traditional aim of liberal education.
Barzun argues that the mind does not work analytically in the process of cultivating culture. For that process we need "intuitive understanding which is derived from the experience directly and cannot be conveyed in definitions but only suggested by analogies and imagery. His main point is that culture must be grasped gradually through reflection, meditation and conversation, and this statement takes us to the heart of the idea of liberal education -- to what
Socrates and his friends were doing and what would still be worthwhile for us to do.^^ Thinking and dialogue concerned with excellence gradually teaches us what is praiseworthy and what is not. In this integration of mind and spirit, thought and feeling, we gradually place our experiences in order, which leads to a considered point of view, and one which is much more than simply a reflection of our prevailing liberal ideology. Such dialogue is the central dynamic of liberal education and the primary legacy of Socrates and Athens.
Throughout the history of liberal education the centrality of conversation about excellence has given way to other concerns. Formal education, whether directed by Church or State, has largely been a matter of socialization into the predominant ways of thinking and 73 acting of a given society, and the actualization of liberal education has in turn been shaped by these concerns. Again as exemplified by
Socrates, the idea of liberal education is always in conflict with the prevailing ideology of the day, any ideology, simply because ideology limits the capacity for thought. In turn, no ideology, whether
Puritan or liberal, emphasizes this process of working out one's own sense of excellence, for each has its own doctrines of what to praise and what to condemn, although this is obscured in the latter's case by its rhetoric of freedom.
This problem of imbuing liberal education with a spirit and purpose foreign to the Greeks is not only a modern problem. For as long as the tradition of liberal education has existed, there has been a tendency for its spirit and its aim to be obscured in the formalization of that spirit. By formalization I am referring to two interrelated developments, the creation of systematic philosophy on the one hand and the liberal arts on the other. While both began in the life of Greece and were inspired by Socrates in particular, the path pursued by each was largely away from that which inspired them.
Though systematic philosophy stems from Socrates' application of logic
and definition to his pursuit of excellence, the emphasis of
philosophy soon changed to the method itself, to a matter of logic and
formal knowledge. Its origins in conversation concerning excellence
were largely forgotten. And the liberal arts, which stem from the
Greek assumption "that the only genuine forces which could form the
soul were words and sounds, and-so far as they work through words or 74 sounds or both-rhythm and harmony" (Jaeger) would become categories of knowledge, emphasizing the memorization of rules and the analysis
Of passages. This preoccupation with truth, logic, and formal knowledge can be seen as the legacy of one part of the Greek spirit, analytic reason, dominating at the expense of both beauty and excellence. The pursuit of formal knowledge has become the primary goal of all education, taking us away from conversation concerning excel 1ence.
As I interpret it, the aim of liberal education in the Socratic mode is not knowledge, but thought, which orders our knowledge in a way that we find fitting. While most writers familiar with the tradition of liberal education share this emphasis on thought rather than knowledge, the traditional tendency to emphasize knowledge as superior to mere opinion has led these writers to defend the tradition in terms of knowledge. For the purpose of clarification let us briefly consider the origins of the formalization of liberal education in order to understand how a tradition essentially inspired by the ability of one man to make others think would become a tradition which became identified with knowing.
Liberal education must ask whether cultural excellence can be taught. While the pursuit of excellence had been central to the Greek way of life for centuries, it was not until the Sophists of the 5th and 4th century B.C. that theories were developed on how to achieve this ideal of culture. According to Jaeger, the Sophists were the 75 first to conceive the conscious ideal of culture, and In turn "made
Greece conscious of her own culture."25 n was the Sophists who invented rhetoric and transmuted the old educational tradition of poetry into the language and ideology of rationalism. In particular, it was the claim of these itinerant teachers to be able to teach excellence, particularly of the political sort, that we must note, for this is where Socrates enters the picture asking the Sophists and others exactly what they mean by "excellence."
In Plato's early dialogues we find Socrates investigating the nature of arete and its relation to the soul. He asks: What is arete? Can it be taught? Is it knowledge, and, if so, what kind of
Knowledge? If it is knowledge, doesn't someone have to know it well enough to teach it, yet no one seems able to quite say what it is? Is this a knowledge by which to attain arete or is there a knowledge which is itself arete, where "knowledge is the being of him who acts weii?"26 Throughout all this questioning Socrates claims not to know the answers himself, and though others accuse him of using this supposed ignorance as a trick, he asserts to the contrary, "It isn't that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.
Do we believe him? Here we are touching upon the question of
"Socratic irony," made more questionable because we cannot be sure where to draw the line between Socrates and his portrayer, Plato. For some, such as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, this irony is "that disconcerting affection of ignorance and simplicity which was Socrates 76
most effective dialectical weapon."28 por those who think this
defines the essence of his Irony, Socrates Is a rather Irksome
individual, undeserving of his acclaim. Yet, I think It can be safely
assumed that this Is not the Image of Socrates which Inspired
humanists from Cicero to Erasmus to John Adams. For those who have
been fascinated with Socrates over the ages, the Irony Is much more
profound than this. It Is not that Socrates never uses his Ignorance
as a weapon, but that in the deepest sense he does believe himself
ignorant, the irony steiiming from the sense that in his awareness of
his ignorance he knows more than those who falsely believe they know.
There is also irony in the possibility that he knows that the method he uses, the pointing out of contradictions and the pushing for definitions, will not directly lead to the knowledge that he seeks, but will only clear the ground of false knowledge. Dialect clears the mind of false knowledge so as to be open to perceive the "flying spark" of truth.
He often implies that if we could see the good clearly it would be impossible not to choose it over the bad. He is fully aware that
this clarity of vision is beyond our reach, yet in the process of talking about it one somehow comes to care for virtue (excellence).
Although the equation "virtue is knowledge" is often attributed to him, it is not clear what he means, his sense of knowledge having an ironic twist to it. What he does say clearly in the Apology is that he is most concerned with persuading others to "care more exceedingly
for the soul, to make it as good as possible.Exactly how making 77 the soul good is to be accomplished we cannot be sure, so Socrates has always remained a source of controversy, infecting us to this day with his perplexity. He has had a unique place in history, able to continue his self-described function as midwife, able to bring our thoughts to birth rather than instruct us.
This vision of Socrates has inspired both the tradition of liberal education and the development of systematic philosophy, but it has generally been lost in the course of the formalization of each.
Formal education, even v/hen called liberal, is more concerned with instruction than infecting people with perplexity, and philosophers have not been content to leave philosophy as a matter of circular discussions revolving around the questions of excellence and virtue, as a brief look at each will reveal.
As for philosophy, Hannah Arendt well captures the difference between Socrates' idea of philosophy and what was to follow:
It seems that he, unlike the professional philosophers, felt the urge to check with his fellowman if his perplexities were shared by them -- and this urge is quite different from the inclination to find solutions for riddles and then to demonstrate them to others.
In short, systematic philosophy took the idea of liberal education away from its initial home in conversation about the questions of excellence and made the central question that of truth and the central activity solitary analytic reasoning. Some, such as Nietzsche or more recently Robert Pirsig, would even blame Socrates for making truth the central category of thought rather than excellence, but most arguments 78 on the issues revolve around the differences between Plato and Ari stotle.
I am not certain who characterized all individuals as either
Platonists or Aristotelians but certainly the distinction points to a conflict in liberal education as well as in philosophy. Platonists
tend to think Aristotle missed the subtle sense of the meaning of
truth to Socrates/Plato and firmly believe that the dialogue was not
simply a literary device but essential to the pursuit of this truth.
Those who favor Aristotle see Plato as an eloquent but rudimentary
precursor of Aristotle. The Aristotelian distains Plato's mixture of
prose and poetry, and the Platonist sees Aristotle as dwelling too
much on logical forms and categories. The Platonist seems to see the
truth as a personal vision, the Aristotelian as a matter of verifiable
propositions.^^
The significance of this debate for our purposes is that
Aristotle would become the central figure of Christian philosophy.
Aristotle set the foundation for a philosophy that would become
preoccupied with matters of truth and logic rather than excellence, a
philosophic bent more suitable to the priest than the political
individual. Aristotle does not seem to have attached any particular
significance to the method of dialogue itself, and in noting the
importance of Socrates he only praises the systematic aspects of
Socrates' search. Then, in his system he placed the issues of
excellence in the relatively minor philosophic category of ethics.
Rather than logic applied to dialogue aimed at the clarification of 79 knowledge about excellence, dialectic came to be a study of logic itself, with Aristotle systematizing, for example, the logical strategems used in an argument.As the preeminent philosopher of the Christian world, Aristotle's influence led to the scholastics of the medieval period "whose philosophy was so logical in its nature as well as its method that even modern scholars have found it all but impossible to differentiate between the logical philosophy and the purely didactic logic,It would be this abstract theology accessible only to minds trained in scholastic logic which would be the main target of the polemics of Eramus and the other Christian humanists.
If we turn now from philosophy to the development of the concept
of liberal education itself, we will note a similar pattern for the
two are largely intertwined. What became clarified as the seven
liberal arts in the third or fourth century A.D. stemmed from the
admiration the Romans had for the Greek culture and their attempts to
emulate it through formal education, Cicero in particular felt the
Greek arts and letters to have a civilizing effect and were essential
in cultivating humanitas, from which the term "humanist" comes.
Cicero viewed these arts as a preparation for a life of politics and
philb'sdphy, as did the Greeks. What would become the trivium of
grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric can be traced to the Greek study of
poetry, the rhetoric of the sophists, and the dialectic of Socrates,
but as Cicero imagined it, all of the liberal arts were a preparation
for philosophic thinking and political action. Philosophy as civility 80 and peace of mind, politics as the ability to persuade through oration and the wisdom to know what was the best—this is what Cicero and his friend Varro had in mind when shortly before the fall of the Republic they envisioned an education to civilize their fellow Romans. As the polis and republic receded into history and Christianity expanded in influence, the liberal arts became an education for priests rather than political men. Philosophy became an aid to Christian theology rather than a civilizing influence in politics.^^
Summing up the paths of philosophy and educational history in such a general fashion misses much indeed. But it does seem helpful in terms of our discussion to note, if very roughly how the rise of systematic philosophy and the formalization of liberal education go together. Though the inspiration of Socrates was central to both, the more philosophy became a matter of solitary individuals working out their systems of thought rather than as an aid to conversation, and the more the liberal arts petrified into seven subject areas with rules and principles to be memorized, the further removed were the forms of liberal education from its original spirit.
Summary
In this chapter I have portrayed the Greek spirit and in so doing have given some sense of how their view of life differed from our own. I have also described how the ideal of liberal education has
been inspired by the Greeks, and in particular Socrates, and how in
the process of giving form to the spirit as the liberal arts or as 81 systematic philosophy the spirit was often lost to a deadening formalism. Therefore, there is much in the tradition that even a traditional humanist world not embrace. This is particularly true in the period after the Renaissance when the humanist spirit gave way to that of the Puritan, and liberal education became an instrument of discipline and piety, as I will show in the next two chapters. FOOTNOTES
^Lionel T>"ining, _E. M. Forster (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943), p. 30. o Werner Jaeger, Gilbert Highet (tr.), Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Vol. I. (Oxford: Basil Blackwel 17'1939), p. 11.-
^Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), p. 198.
^Jaeger, op. cit., p. 13.
^Arendt, op. cit., pp. 193-194.
^Jaeger, op. cit., pp. xxiv-xxv.
^Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?" Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), pp. 153-154.
®Ibid., p. 153.
^Ibid., p. 152.
^^Plato, W.H.D. Rouse (tr.). Apology, in Great Dialogues of Plato (New York: New American Library, 1964)7 p. 434^
11 Ibid.
^^Arendt, "What is Freedom?," p. 154.
^^W. H. Auder, "The Greeks and Us," Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 9.
^^Plato, W.H.D. Rouse (tr.). Symposium, in Great Dialogues of PIato (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. llTi
^^Jaeger, op. cit., pp. xxiv-xxvi.
^^Plato, Symposiurn, p. 105.
^^Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 8.
^®Auder, op. cit., p. 32.
82 83
^^Jaeger, op. cit., p. 7.
^°Ibid.. p. 301.
« . . Cornford, Before and After Socrates (CambriHnp- Cambridge University, 1976),~pp. 2^-35. 22 As quoted in Strauss, op. cit., p. 6.
^Jacques Brazun, "Scholarship Versus Culture," The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1984, pp. 99-104.
^^Jaeger, op. cit., p. xxvii.
^^Ibid., p. 301. 26 _Karl Jaspers, Ralph Manheim (tr.), Plato and Augustine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), p. - 27 M T Socrates, in the Meno, as quoted by Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," Social Research, Fall, 1971, p. 431. 28 Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More, American Scholar. Winter, 1978/79, p. 26. 29 Plato, in the Seventh Letter, as quoted by Jaspers, op, cit., p. 21.
^°Plato, Apology, p. 434.
^^Arendt, op. cit., p. 430.
'"''Jaspers, op. cit., p. 62. 33 Rex Warner, The Greek Philosophers (New York: New American Library, 1958), pp. 55 and 112; Jaspers, op. cit., p. 25.
^^Paul Abelson, The Seven Liberal Arts: A Study in Mediaeval Culture (New York: Teachers' College, Columbia University. 1906). d. 7T.
35 Ibid., pp. 4, 52 and 53. CHAPTER III
HUMANISM AND CALVINISM: THE GREEK SPIRIT
FOUND AND LOST
Nothing in human experience has been less in accord with the spirit of Hellenism than the study of the classics in western European and American education...In spite of their pagan origins the cl assics.. .were inculcated in a strongly Christian atmosphere which rejected the whole pagan theory of life.^ Harry Elmer Barnes
There is every evidence that the learned class of Massachusetts Bay became cultivated men, interested in humane letters as well as theology, and that they successfully brought to the Mew World much of the best of the heritage of European civilization.^ Richard Hofstadter
The quotations above illustrate a fundamental conflict in the roots of liberal education in this country. From the perspective of
Barnes, to call the education the Puritans practices “liberal education" seems ridiculous even though they thought of it as such.
However, from Hofstadter's perspective the contention does not seem so ridiculous, for they did indeed prize the life of the mind and maintain the traditional forms of liberal education. Since the
Puritans now seem left behind, this ambiguity does not evoke much attention. However, as I will argue in the next chapter, the Puritans were leaders upon the pathway to our present confusion about liberal education, so we need to clarify our sense of Puritan liberal
84 85 sducation. In this chapt6r and thG nsxt I will dGscribG how the
Calvinist Puritans maintained the tradition of liberal education and the nature of the spirit in which it was maintained. I will also describe the humanist revival of the Greek spirit of liberal education in the Renaissance and how Calvinism evolved out of this humanism. In the process I will describe significant differences between the humanist and the Calvinist, their differing views of the ancient
Greeks and their differing sense of the purpose of liberal education.
To understand the Puritans and their version of liberal education requires some understanding of what is and is not encapsulated in Hofstadter's phrase "much of the best of the heritage of European civilization " If one considers the spirit of Hellenism an essential element of our European heritage, Hofstadter's contention
is misleading, for the Puritan sense of right stands in stark contrast
to that of the Greeks or even to the Renaissance humanists who revived
this spirit. While the Puritans certainly did study "humane letters,"
there was little of the enjoyment of study, the play with words, the
sense of toleration and intellectual freedom that characterized the
Renaissance scholar. And while the Puritans inherited an emphasis
upon the intellect from their humanist and scholastic predecessors,
theirs was an intellect aimed at defending a rigid Calvinist theology.
They studied Plato, but their interpretations of his works and their
appreciation of Socrates as a model of a life well-spent was not that
of a humanist scholar such as Erasmus. Erasmus would declare upon
reading about Socrates... 86
A heathen wrote this to a heathen, yet it has justice, sanctity, truth. I can hardly refrain from saying Saint Socrates, pray for me..."^ but to the Puritan it was clear that none of these heathens would be found in heaven, that, as Perry Miller writes, "the best of heathens fell short of the least of Christians."
While the Greeks turned their attention outward with their love of public self-display, the Puritans turned inward to personal struggles in preparation for an afterlife. Their actions were aimed not at glorifying themselves, a form of sinful vanity, but at glorifying God.
The Puritan is characterized by a degree of internal struggle unknown to the Greeks; he epitomizes what Socrates feared. He is the individual in almost constant disharmony with himself, seeing his own depravity in contrast to the stainless purity of God. Yet, something in this contrast draws him zealously onward, gives him a sense of mission, makes of him an instrument of the Lord. Socrates is the
image of the civilized individual in whom unity and diversity are balanced with little strain; the Puritan is a fanatic who holds unity
and diversity together only with the greatest of effort, but perhaps
as Perry Miller states, with a "delight in ordeal." The Puritan loves
perfection because he sees so clearly his own imperfection. With this
love he will be a radical force in Europe, for he will not tolerate
anything short of his vision, and for the same reason he will be a
conservative force in the New World. 87
The Puritan vision includes an escape from Catholocism on the one hand and a purification of Catholocism on the other and is nicely captured in a sentence by Sebastian Frank: "You think you have escaped from the monastery, but everyone must now be a monk throughout his life."^ While the marketplace suggests the central image of our own world, and the polis that of the Greeks, the corresponding image for the Puritahs was the world-as-monastery.
This vision and spirit are the legacy of John Calvin who brought the city of Geneva under his sway approximately a century before the
Puritans came to the New World. To understand how liberal education and Calvinism came together we need to consider the role of the
Renaissance humanist as a reviver and conveyor of the Greek spirit on the one hand and a progenitor of the Reformation on the other.
The Renaissance is often thought of too simply as the rebirth of ancient learning. However, Jaeger placed it in the right perspective by noting that the 4th, 12th, and 13th centuries also had periods of
revival of interest in antiquity; what we know as the Renaissance was merely the greatest of these revivals. From about 1350 to 1600,
certain scholars turned away from an ascetic and abstract
scholasticism and searched for a new criteria of a life well spent.
They found it in the literary remains of Greece and Rome, "the
manuscript evidence of which had to be literally recovered from
medieval garrets and forgotten scrap heaps.While there are many 88 generalizations that one encounters about these "humanists," the one clear-cut characteristic they shared was "the desire to establish clear and correct versions of the ancient classics." They originated scholarship as we know it.
From the standpoint of education, what was particularly noteworthy about the Renaissance was that there was a greater emphasis upon teaching. More significant than the humanists' scholarly accuracy was that as they discovered the ancient world and related these discoveries to their own lives they revealed to students how to do the same. Men of wide culture, if they taught French, for example, did not simply teach the language but also taught history, geography, and literature. Gilbert Highet suggests that these were men "who could teach...how to read, to talk, to think, to know, to act, to live."^
Thus, we see humanists such as Erasmus and his friend More not
only learning Greek and translating ancient texts, but also enriching
their lives with the spirit of Greece. Their works are spiced with
the irony and humor that reflect the Socratic-Platonic tradition,
"that teasing wit, that gently mockery, that vivid sense of the
absurd." They seem to have what Walter Ong has called "the sense that
utterances can somehow touch mysterious depths which analysis can
never quite fathom," the sense that the deepest truths cannot be
communicated directly. Erasmus shocked the graver of his fellow
scholars with a book which mocks his and their efforts, suggesting
they were all ruining their eyes for no good reason. And More 89 referred to himself as too old a fool to change his ways as he awaited his own execution for refusing allegiance to his Protestant king.^ One can imagine Socrates smiling at such self-mockery.
Renaissance humanists, however, lived in a vastly different public space than 5th century Athenians. Most notably there was no polis, no space of excellence in which to perform. The unity of spirit of Socrates was not possible for them, since politics and philosophy were no longer interwoven. It was now hard to reconcile free thinking with public service. More took the path of public service, rising to be Lord Chancellor of England, only to liken civil life to a prison--this before the metaphor became literal. Erasmus said of his friend, "he disliked the court and the company of princes because he had a peculiar hatred of tyranny and love of equality."
For his own part Erasmus chose to keep out of politics, other than to advise princes through a book. As Hugh Trevor-Roper describes the choice, he "preferred poverty with scholarship and freedom to the golden servitude of court life."® The humanists also differed from the Greeks in their tendency to see culture very narrowly, solely in aesthetic terms, so that the very word "aesthetic" comes down to us as
largely a matter of refinement, usually excessive refinement, without
the more robust political connotations. These differences between Renaissance humanists and the Greeks
are similar to the differences between ourselves and the Greeks.
Though the Greek way of life compels admiration, their world was so
different from ours, or of 15th and 16th century Europe, that we are 90 left with a major problem of translation; How can we translate that which was admirable in their lives into our own?
The Renaissance humanists dealt with the translation problem in one way, largely in reaction to Scholasticism which was itself an attempt to emulate what was perceived as a classical, rational approach. There have been many other attempts at translation including those of the Platonists, Epicureans, Neo-Platonists and rival camps of Aristotelians, and by the Reformation all of these currents of thought were present in the universities.^
Calvin and his followers, however, differed significantly from the other humanists. Many Renaissance humanists made an effort to approach the ancients on their own terms seeking illumination from them for their own lives. The Calvinist, on the other hand, approached them with his mind made up. While the humanist's pursuit of truth was a matter of developing clear and correct versions of ancient texts, encouraging free discussion and varying views, the
Calvinist looked solely to the Bible for a singular truth--God's divine plan”-giving rise to a uniformity of thought. Let us examine how this singular mind evolved out of the intellectual diversity of the Renaissance.
In 1523, six years after Luther had posted his theses, and while
Erasmus was reaching his 58th year and bemoaning the direction of events, a 14 year old Jean Cauvin became a student at the Sorbonne.
We know him as Calvin because in the fashion of the day he had
Latinized Cauvin to Calvinus, an indication of the humanism that was 91 still vital at the time. During his years of education, it seemed that Calvin himself was destined to become a humanist scholar. While he studied the law in obedience to his father's conmand, his real passions as a student, according to one biographer, were for the languages, literatures, and cultures of antiquity. His first published work was solidly in the humanist vein, a study of the political thought of Seneca which barely mentioned scripture. He had even given up the law and was preparing to enter the priesthood, when as he put it, the Lord "subdued my heart (too hardened for its age) to docility.
Since Calvin was not of a self-disclosing nature, biographers have not been able to specify the exact date of his conversion, and it is hard to know whether it was prompted by the proceedings of heresy that the Sorbonne brought against him in 1533, or vice versa. For our purposes it does not matter, but had he been born a few years earlier it is easy to imagine him lost in obscurity, living the life of a
little known scholar, for this is the life that he always wished for,
if we are to believe his statements on the matter. Calvin describes
himself as timid and retiring, shrinking back from conflict with
others, desirous of the contemplative life. That the path he took
seems so contrary to his human tendencies is typical of the Calvinist
spirit of self-denial, of being subdued by the Lord to an instrument
of his will, despite personal considerations.
Calvin's public views are most evident in his work in Geneva.
Though ordered to leave Geneva in 1538, he was asked to return three 92 years later to help them enact the religious and social reformation of the city. Calvin's desire was a reaction to what R. H. Tawney has described as the "cynical materialism which seemed a denial of all that had been meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the more horrifying because it was in the capital of the Christian church that it reached its height." The humanists felt a similar repulsion but they chose to believe in "the gradual regeneration of mankind by the victory or reason over superstition and brutality and avarice.
Calvin either did not believe this or found the consequences unacceptable; the Lord expected more than this. Calvin knew how
"stubbornly addicted to the superstitions of the papacy" he had been himself until he received the Lord's grace, and he never underestimated the extent of human depravity. Believing that "any grace which a man possessed came from the free action of God alone" left Calvin with little faith in the power of reason to regenerate the world, particularly a reason which itself was corrupted by the fall.
As John S. Brubacher has suggested:
The confidence that the pagan and, to an extent, the Humanist had in being able to lift themselves by education alone, Calvin could only look upon as vain conceit and pride.
Only with a reconstructed Church and State, in which every department
of life, public as well as private, was penetrated by religion could
society be renewed. Thus, while Thomas More set up a school in his
home, Calvin sought to make all of Geneva "the most perfect school of
Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles,
which is how John Knox later described it. 93
From Geneva, Calvinism spread through France, Holland, Scotland, and England as visitors, such as Knox, were fired by the Calvinist vision. And as the Calvinist spirit spread. Calvinist education reflected both his conviction of human depravity and his revolutionary
sense of mission, inculcating the discipline necessary for a Christian
life of self-denying labor based on scriptural authority.
The following description by Barnes refers to the general
influence of the Reformation upon education, and reflects the value
Calvinists placed upon tedious mental labor as an instrument of both
mental and physical discipline.
From the use of classical literature and philosophy as a preparation for life, the classical tradition degenerated into a stereotyped and dull cultivation of syntax and linguistics.^^
Education came to be largely a memorization of Latin passages and
grammatical rules, and this was the kind of education the Puritans
brought to America.
There is another aspect of this education, however, which gives
the Puritan a certain intellectual stature. The Puritan
minister-leaders were exceedingly logical in their approach to the
Bible. This was the legacy of the scholastics whom the Puritans
derided while using methods of thought inherited from them. It is the
now little known Petrus Ramus who acted as intermediator in providing
the Calvinists with a way of thinking similar to the scholastics but
without their Papal connotations. Although not a household word
today, there was an "astounding circulation" of his works around the
academic world of the 16th and 17th centuries. 94
Calvin provides us with paradigm of the soul of Puritanism, but
Petrus Ramus shows us the Puritan mind. Described as a "pedagogue's
pedagogue," by Walter Ong, Ramus lived in mid-sixteenth century
France, a scholar with a strong Calvinist bent. Ong describes him as
a "singularly unimaginative person," lacking interest in making
conversation, with a positive aversion to witty and pithy sayings,
such as those that dotted the works of Erasmus. He was exclusively
interested in developing a systematic and efficient curriculum, and
wrote extensively on educational methods, particularly on how to
develop suitably organized textbooks. His primary legacy was his
logic, which was a noteworthy part of the Puritan's European heritage.
As Lawrence Cremin has stated, he was one of the three authors most
emphasized by the educated American Puri tans.Ramist logic was a
logic of what was given, not a logic of speculation or inquiry. His
approach to a subject was to search for relevant matter, and then to
arrange it in statements and syllogisms, an approach reflected in
early American Puritan sermons.
This logic was used to order growing knowledge of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. It was particularly attractive to the
practical minded Puritans who were primarily of the commercial classes
and preferred clear-cut thought—things to manipulate and rearrange—
to "the imponderables that haunted the world of learning." The
Puritans were accustomed to dealing with commodities and preferred
their knowledge to be of the same order, unappreciative as they were
of the elusiveness of wisdom. Ramist logic was also well suited to the 95
Calvinist inclination towards useful knowledge, plain speech, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. It would be used to analyze
Biblical passages in order to deduce the "true" message out of what often seemed conflicting messages.
Along with Calvinism, Ramist logic made its way to England where it was in vogue in Cambridge and, to a lesser extent, in Oxford in the
1620's where the Puritan leaders who would create the Bay colony were
being educated. They attended Cambridge and Oxford against a backdrop
of political and religious tension than in 12 years would erupt into
civil war. Both the education they received and the political
atmosphere of the English universities affected the curriculums the
Puritans would establish in the Mew World, so a brief consideration of
those universities is necessary.
In the already beginning contest between Catholic and Protestant
points of view--with the Church of England being the bone of
contention--theology was "the one great, absorbing intellectual
interest" at Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention the general society
as well. According to Mori son, we have no subject that compares today
to the pervasiveness of theological discussion in the seventeenth
century. Of course, this interest in religion was not new. Since the
middle ages, "the main, almost exclusive, scholarly preoccupation of
the English universities" had been "theology in both its aspects.
First, there was the form the church would take in relationship to the
state. Second, there was the question of "divinity—the philosophical
aspect of Christianity, the relation of man and nature to God and the 96 nature of God himself." This should be kept in mind as a balance to
Hofstadter's assertion that Cambridge and Oxford at this time "had long since been thoroughly infused with humanist scholarship." This seems an excessively simplified sunniation, for, as Mori son states, the
"deep and fruitful labors of Renaissance humanists in collecting and editing texts of ancient classics went on outside university walls."
Also, these universities "did not foster creative literature" nor "do much to foster creative scholarship...outside the important branch of
theology." And neither Oxford nor Cambridge had any teacher to
compare with the Italian, Dutch, and French humanists of their day.
Lastly, the great figures in Elizabethan literature who did go to
college, men such as Spencer, Marlowe, and Milton, "regarded their
college careers as a waste of time," an opinion that John Locke would
concur with a few decades later. Such was the "intellectual life of
Cambridge" (which set the pace for the intellectual life of New
England) as described by a very sympathetic observer of the
Puri tans.^® FOOTNOTES
^Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World (New York: DoverTressTTg^^TTTTTJT:-- 2 Richard Hofstader, Anti-Intellectualism in America (New Ynrk* Vintage Books, 1963), p. 61. ---
^Barnes, op. cit., p. 559.
^Ibid., p. 509. 5 John S. Brubacher, A History of the Problems of Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 249.
^Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (New York: Vintaqe Books. 1950), p. 189. -
^Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More," American Scholar, Winter, 1978/79, p. 26.
®Ibid., p. 28. q Barnes, op. cit., p. 566.
^^John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 104-103.
H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926), p. 110.
^^John S. Brubacher, op. cit., p. 311.
^^Barnes, op. cit., p. 492.
^^Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience 1607-1783 (New York: Harper and Row, l9/0).
^^Walter Ong, S. J., Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 142-164.
^^Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 18-22.
97 CHAPTER IV
PURITANICAL HUMANISM:
THE FOUNDING OF LIBERAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA
The tradition of liberal education was brought to America by the
Puritans and infused with their spirit. Samuel Eliot Morison, the historian of Harvard, has pointed out that though the Puritans did not possess the gentle spirit of the humanists, we should nevertheless be grateful that they maintained the humanist tradition at all, since
"the mere physical labor of getting a living in a virgin country is so great as to exhaust and stultify the human spirit unless it has some great emotional drive." In such situations, he claims, the
"alternative to intellectual Puritanism is intellectual vacuity." Our concern here is not to praise or blame the Puritans but to understand their contribution to our present confusion. Until the late nineteenth century in this country, liberal education was infused with a Puritan Calvinism that carried with it a quite particular interpretation of the classical past: the Greek sense of excellence became Christian virtue and the Greek gods were seen as angels of the
Lord. Thus, while the Puritans did maintain the classical tradition,
they altered it in ways that led to its rejection. As Alfred North
Whitehead noted early in this century, "Of all types of man today
existing, classical scholars are the most remote from the Greeks of
the Peri clean times.
98 99
While the Puritan origin of liberal education in this country sewed the seeds of our present confusion, we do not find this clearly spelled out and reflected upon in the literature on the subject. At times Puritan liberal education is portrayed as something fortunately transcended and now forgotten. At other times, as with Morison, they are honored for maintaining the classical tradition, but it is not made clear how in altering the spirit of the tradition they altered the tradition itself. Thus, we receive a blurred picture of the role of Puritanism in the course of American higher education, a picture that we aim to bring into focus in this chapter.
From 1636 to the last half of the 19th century, American higher education was generally conducted and controlled by Calvinists. As
Lawrence Veysey has noted:
In nineteenth-century America, educational and theological orthodoxy almost always went together. Orthodox Christianity, as the college president usually understood the term, meant a diluted Cal vini sm.^
Although dominated by Calvinism, throughout this period there was a
growing rebellion in higher education against the constraints of the
Puritan way of life or at least a liberalization of these constraints.
The issues of academic freedom, student election of courses, and, in
the 1960s, the student rebellion against in loco parentis, were all
reactions to the "College Way" initiated by the Puritans at Harvard.
In this chapter we will examine the nature of the Puritan mind and its
version of liberal education as a first step towards an understanding 100 of the struggles between the Puritan and the liberal for control of higher education.
A Learned Clergy and a Lettered People
We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and by-word through the world. John Winthrop (in a sermon while aboard ship, heading to the New World)^
Winthrop well expresses the Puritan sense of destiny in coming to the New World. They left England believing that the efforts at
reform of the church were failing, that the Protestant efforts to
reform Europe as well had only gone part way, that they needed further
guidance, and that they, the Puritans, were being called into the
wilderness to establish a true orthodoxy, a City upon a Hill. As a
Puritan said "...that which other Nations have not attained to this
day, may by the blessing of God be reached by us."
While some of their Puritan brethren in England viewed their
migration as a flight from the battle, they viewed their move as a
maneuver against the Anglican Church, which they were still determined
to dominate eventually. It was in this spirit that the Puritans
founded the Bay Colony in 1630, and subsequently Harvard College in
1636.^ 101
In the introductory chapter of The American College and
University, Frederick Rudolph suggested that there has been too much emphasis on the "narrow religious purpose" Harvard and other early
American colleges, a position echoed by Richard Hofstadter as well.
Indeed, Morison argues that "the two cardinal principles of English
Puritanism which most profoundly affected the social development of
New England and the United States were not religious tenets, but educational ideals: a learned clergy and a lettered people."^
While this emphasis on the Puritan concern for "education for posterity" dispels one false impression-^namely that they were unintellectual religious enthusiasts--it seems likely to create
another, an impression that the Puritan concern for education was
somehow separate from and more important than the place religion held
in their lives. Nothing was more important than their religion, but
they thought of religion in the broadest terms, penetrating all
aspects of society, as did Calvin. That they were not solely
concerned with training ministers is true: they were equally
concerned with educating their magistrates in piety, so that they
would work harmoniously with the ministers in maintaining the City of
God. It was not that theology alone was studied but that all was
studied from the perspective of theology, as we will discuss later.
On the other hand, the Puritans were more concerned with the
intellect than an emphasis on their piety might suggest. They prized
both intellect and piety, and there was an ongoing tension between the
two, as Hofstadter points out: 102
Puritanism has always required a delicate balance between the intellect, which was deemed as essential to true religion in New England, and emotion, which was necessary to the strength and durability of Puritan piety. This balance proved to be precarious...”
In one sense. Harvard College was founded in order to maintain this balance. Therefore, much of what follows is an examination of the
relationship among intellect, emotion, and piety.
When I speak of the "Puritan" in the following pages, it is
primarily the minister-leaders, the purest of the Puritans, whom I
have in mind, and their concerns were not always identical with those who followed them. As Norman Petit writes:
The settlers were mainly concerned with preserving their freedom and economy, while the clergy struggled to preserve the ritual structure of the churches; and indifference to the inner life became more and more pronounced.'
Even in the early days, as the story goes, one minister preaching to
an outlying village congregation was told" "Sir, you are mistaken:
you think you are preaching to the people of the Bay; our main end is
to catch fish."
That the "mood" varied among the ministers according to their
individual temperments may also be assumed; some would emphasize the
depravity of their audience in order to humble them into submission to
the word of God; others would emphasize the importance of striving for
individual salvation. There was nevertheless a certain shared frame
of mind concerning God's relation to man, with clear lines separating 103 orthodoxy from heresy, and it is these rudiments which we will now consider.
The Problem of Human Nature
To the Puritan "the infinite variety of the world's misery (is) reducible to a concrete problem, the relationship of the individual to the One. ° And this problem was man made in the form of Adam's fall from grace which "has put all out of order, and has brought Confusion and Desolation on the works of God." God created a splendid universe based on a majestic plan, but man ruined it through his own weakness, and in the process lost his ability to comprehend God's will. An inner conversion was the door through which one regained a feeling of harmony with this divine plan. Thus, as with Calvin, the conversion was the most significant event in the life of the Puritan, and it was not wrought by "morall perswasion" but by God's powerful intervention. While the process of regeneration remained a mystery,
"the translation from sin to grace was so abrupt that a man could tell when it happened to himself, and others could recognize the outward evidence.
And more hinged upon this conversion than a feeling of harmony with God's divine plan. One's salvation was at stake, or at least seemed to be. While Calvin had believed that only a comparatively few individuals were predestined to be saved, and all others damned, it is not surprising that the Calvinists after him came to think that they, being the best people that they knew, were probably the elect. The
American Puritans tended to go a step further and believed that true 104 conversion Implied true election. Believing also that this true conversion was detectable by their fellow Puritans gave them even more essurance on this score. Yet, one could never be sure, since one could only be imperfectly sanctified, given human depravity; thus, even those who thought they were "the elect were not always certain;
they had their fluctuations of doubt and their melancholy lapses from
grace." Their ministers played upon their fear that God might withdraw his help in this life, even though they might be saved in the
next, using plagues and crop failures as evidence of God's displeasure.
However, to explain the Puritan striving simply in terms of fear
of damnation or disaster befalling them is to miss the heart of the
true Puritan, although we may suspect fear to be the motivation of the
less devout. According to Miller the true Puritan has motivated by
the "rellish and taste of the sweetness of God's love" rather than
fear. Thomas Hooker, a Puritan Minister, used the metaphor of two
women and a physician to explain true piety, the one woman being sick
and wishing to be healed, the other wishing to marry the physician,
pointing out that the "soule that is carried in a kind of love and
affection to godliness, he would not have Christ only to heale him,
but he would be married to Christ.
Though we may today view Puritan piety as a "gloomy,
otherworldly, and tragic conception of life," Perry Miller argues that
the Puritans did not experience it this way. The true Puritan
welcomed the opportunity to serve God and glorify him in a corrupt
world. The Puritans thought they had "not only their assurances, but 105 also sometimes their extasies,"—those moments when they would see a glimpse of the divine plan and feel harmony with God. Therefore, all ordeals were tests to be met with delight. Rather than having a tragic view of the world. Miller contends that they lacked a sense of tragedy, which, as the sense of sin became less urgent in the 18th century, led them to smugness and snobbery.
The problem the Puritan faced was that he could never be quite certain that his actions stenmed from a love of Christ rather than a concern for his own salvation and his crops. As Miller sums it up:
A Puritan was forced to go through life thinking that if what he had supposed was his regeneration was authentic, he was secure; if it was not, he was worse off than ever.^^
The machinations of his own depravity must have seemed infinite to the
Puritan, "for he could undertake self-search, perceive his sin, pray for repentance, and then was secretly so satisfied with himself for becoming humble as to spoil the whole enterprise." Thus, the Puritan was often embroiled in "meticulous and unceasing self-examination,"
and at times so distrusting of himself as to prompt the following
advice: "Therefore, you had need pray for the repentance of your
repentance and to beg pardon of all your prayers.Guilt or
innocence before the Lord did not hinge on what one did but on what
one intended, so they unceasingly attempted to decipher what their
true intentions were (and undoubtedly the intentions of others as
well). Thus, Puritan piety was characterized by brief moments of
ecstasy and clarity and undoubtedly longer periods of doubt and 106 despair. As Miller states: "Puritanism had no use whatsoever for the saint who was pure by nature and holy without struggle and temptation." However, they did not want their internal struggles to become externalized in religious bickering and factionalism. Thus, discipline was emphasized, both self-discipline as well as of the community upon the individual. And to inform this discipline, to give the saints criteria to separate the work of Satan from that of God, a system of religious tenets were scrupulously upheld. It was also however a traditional aspect of Protestantism that such tenets were not simply to be taken upon trust--a notion scorned and attributed to
Papists—but must be supported by reasons and arguments as well.
Reason
If the religion of the Puritans was simply a matter of the ecstasy of conversion there would have been little need for the founding of Harvard. However, their religion was not simply a piety but an intellectual system as well. As Augustine had, the ministers argued that one must first believe in order to know, that revelation indeed superceded reason and that knowledge itself would not save.
But while faith was a prerequisite, faith itself was not simply an emotional experience but a matter of understanding. The Puritan minister Samuel Willard argued: "Faith is grounded upon knowledge, for how can a man choose the ways of god unless he knows what they are?" If knowledge without faith is empty, "zeale is but a wildefire without knowledge," argued John Cotton.And, as we shall soon see. 107
Cotton and other Puritan leaders were very wary of a "wildefire" burning out of control.
The Puritans seem paradoxical because their piety was both emotional and intellectual, in a "delicate balance" as Hofstadter mentioned. In support of conversion they would condemn reason; in support of reason they would condemn overzealousness; what they wanted was a perfect combination of the two. The ideal, as Miller states, was "guidance of the heart by the mind," but it was a mind guided by the truth of Scripture.
The Protestantism of Luther had begun with the notion that God's truth was in the Bible for anyone to see--thus, negating the need for the Catholic Church as intermediary between man and God. It quickly became evident though that in reading the Bible individuals could see different truths. The general conclusion drawn by each of the
Protestant sects was not that the Biblical message was ambiguous, but
that their opponents were not using the proper method of
interpretation. Thus, the truth of the Bible, though not exactly
self-evident as originally thought, was there to be found by those who
used logic properly. At least this was the Calvinist view; some sects
were more anti-rationalist.
Thus, while the mind was to guide the heart, the mind primarily
consisted of an ability to interpret the Bible logically. As Charles
Chauncy, a president of Harvard, argued:
Yea how shall a man know when a Scripture is wrested, or falsely applyed, or a false use is made of it, or a false consequence is drawn out of it, or a true, without some principles of logick. 108
Most Skilled, of course, in the use of this logic were the ministers themselves, who would have to defend the orthodox theology against
heresies" and simple "errors." However, they did not reserve their carefully reasoned disquisitions for controversies with other scholars but used them in their sermons as well, which were lessons to the congregations in Ramist logic as well as theology:
A Puritan preacher never surrenders to feeling; he does not celebrate the glories of religion in sustained paeans or bring home its terrors by shouting, but argues his way step by step, inexorably disposing of point after point, quoting Biblical verses, citing authorities, watching for fallacies in logic, drawing upon the sciences for analogies, utilizing any information that seems pertinent.
The Puritans would support piety with reason, but would not acknowledge reason when it was used to criticize his doctrines. As with John Cotton, "in fundamental and principall points of Doctrine or
Worship, the Word of God in such things is so clear, that he cannot but be convinced in Conscience of the dangerous error of his way after once or twice admonition..." The dissenter who illustrates the fallibility of reason "is not persecuted for Cause of Conscience, but for sinning against his Owne Conscience.The Puritan was not about to have his tenets undermined by reason; reason used in such a way was obviously not "right reason." We can see how such fine distinctions were confusing to the layman.
Given this somewhat arbitrary application of reason and logic by the clergy, their warnings about its fallibility, and the great emphasis placed on emotional conversion, it is not surprising that the 109 layman came to question exactly why such a learned clergy was
necessary. For the clergy this was exactly the wrong conclusion to
reach from their preachings, especially when one argued for it
publicly as did Anne Hutchinson.
The Hutchinson controversy is particularly significant for our
purposes, since it formed the backdrop of the founding of Harvard and
forced the magistrates and ministers to delay the actual establishment
of the college until Hutchinson and her followers were dealt with.
Not only did Hutchinson question the need for a learned clergy, she
also argued that once "the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person"
the saint should "surrender his will to the promptings and propulsions
from within." This was the "wildefire" of which Cotton warned, for
who knew what one might be prompted to do or say by an inner voice?
Governor Winthrop imagined such thinking leading to ethical anarchy,
and, after a church synod excommunicated Hutchinson, he banished her
from the colony.^^ If there had been any doubt among the Puritan leaders about the
urgent need for a college, the Hutchinson controversy quelled it.
Whatever fine phrases were used, such as "learning for posterity, the
founders of Harvard must have also been motivated by the fear of the
overzealousness of their own followers. Harvard would help to
maintain the balance, which would tip once again towards emotion in
the Great Awakening of the 18th century. 110
The Purpose of Harvard College
Now, what was the purpose of all this effort? The usual explanation is that Harvard and the other colonial colleges were intended to educate ministers. This is only a half-truth. The dynamic motive, to be sure was to train up a learned ministry...But the purpose of the founders was much broader than that; and the curriculum they established was not a divinity curriculum.^® Samuel Eliot Mori son
Mori son is the recognized authority on the history of Harvard
College, and his views have influenced all others writing on early
American higher education. In reading Morison it is helpful to understand that his major works were written in the 1930's in reaction to the anti-Puritan histories written in the 1920's , most notably those of James Truslow Adams and V. L. Parrington. Morison's works balance his predecessor's harsh portrait by emphasizing the more humane aspects of Puritan life, not always, unfortunately, entirely
accurately. He tells us, for example, that in Harvard's early years
the liberal arts were studied as well as theology, implying that
Harvard offered what we might think of as a traditional, balanced
liberal education. Yet Perry Miller writes that the curriculum was an
attempt "to combine in one systematic belief both piety and the
inherited body of knowledge," suggesting a clear subordination of
knowledge to systematic belief. Morison's desire to humanize the
Puritans leads him to minimize the fact that the liberal arts were
addressed to a training in orthodoxy just as theology was. Ill
Miller, once a student of Morrison and eventually the most acclaimed scholar of Puritanism, could see the conflict between the
Puritan s style of humanism and liberal education. Their aim was for students to absorb not reflect upon knowledge:
Puritan education did not intend that students think for themselves, but it did intend that they should take in the vast quantity of received and orthodox information.^^
With Miller's help let us reflect a moment on the nature of
Puritanical humanism by focusing upon two aspects of the early Harvard
College: its role in maintaining the Puritan orthodoxy and the organization of the college and its curriculum which were designed to fulfill this role.
In reference to the contention of Harvard's founders that the college was formed with broad educational purposes in mind. Perry
Miller comments:
instead of being a charter of academic liberalism, it was rather a manefesto of orthodoxy against radicals who had contended, or were then contending, that religion and preaching should be taken out of the control of colleges and professors.
On the other hand Mori son sees the issue as intellectual versus anti- intel 1 ectual, assuming falsely that "the advancement and perpetuation of learning was one and the same with a succession of literate ministers" (Miller).The followers of Hutchinson were hostile
toward classical learning ("What has Christ to do with Apollo?") but
their hostility was particularly aimed at the assumed connection 112 between this education and religion, a position held by some In
England as well and known as Antinomianism.
Antinomians were not tolerated in the Bay Colony, so we have no direct evidence of their reaction to the situation there, but we can look at their counterparts in England. There, two well known advocates of Antinomianism, William Dell and John Webster, professed to have no quarrel with education per se; they objected to making learning "...the criteria of a candidates fitness for the ministry."
They argued that ministers, like geniuses, were not made by education but born of the spirit.
Miller suggests that ministers defending the necessity of a learned clergy had not entirely disinterested motives:
The clergy had a base and ulterior motive in defending the schools...they loved learning neither for its own sake nor for its assistance to faith, but simply because it got them privileges and worldly power.
Learning and worldly power and privilege were all one, united issue to the mind of the Puritan founders for whom society, economics, and the will of God were one and the same. They perceived themselves as the indispensable instruments of God's will and, without any consciously self-interested motives, defended learning because they themselves were learned; what was good for them and their kind was identical to what was best for society. In defending learning the founders were defending orthodoxy and the social status quo as well, most
particularly their own. 113
We should consider the purpose of the intellect as understood by the Puritan minister-founders. The Puritans placed a high value on the intellect, but it was an intellect expected to deduce the truth in that which was already acknowledged. When Henry Dunster, the second president of Harvard, concluded through his own thinking that infant baptism was unscriptural, he was forced to resign for upholding such a
Baptist heresy.23 And, as we all know Roger Williams was rewarded for his arguments in favor of religious tolerance by banishment.
If the Calvinist "slogans and injunctions...were not conceived
as limiting the scope of learning," as Mori son asserts, it was only
because whatever was to be learned was to be learned in a way
congenial to Puritan orthodoxy. As Charles Chauncy, the third
president, declared in 1655, "only those works suitable* to
Christianity were to be used in the classroom." Many Greek and Roman
works were included, but only because of the Puritan ingenuity in
finding support for their orthodoxy in them. As Miller states;
They tortured texts of great writers and did violence to meaning in order to prove that the agreement between pagans and revelation resulted not only from the inherent similarity of the law of nature with the Gospel, but from actual plagiarizing by Greeks and Romans of Jewish lore. They particularly interpreted Plato in this fashion.2^
They studied a broad curriculum but not in the spirit of inquiry or
speculdtion. Instead, it was a way of verifying the troth of
orthodoxy by revealing that God's plan was so imprinted in nature that
even the poor pagan could perceive some of it 114
Still It would have been impossible for generations of students to have read the classics without some glimmerings of the possibilities beyond orthodoxy. Lawrence Cremin sagely speculates:
...whatever the spirit in which the classics were taught, there was certainly immense diversity in the manner in which they were learned; indeed the ideas gleaned from them were doubtless discussed, disputed, and eventually acted upon in ways quite at odds with what Harvard's founders had intended.
And Miller has also suggested that while studying the liberal arts students encountered ideas that could not entirely be subjugated to orthodox interpretation. Surely education at Harvard did stimulate
some thought, enough thought, in fact, that by 1716 good Puritans like
Cotton Mather could no longer look upon it as a bulwark of Puritan
faith. The founders of Harvard wanted their lay leaders and their ministry to share a common knowledge and a common logic so that the
magistrates would agree with John Cotton and his successors "that in
fundamental and principal points of Doctrine or Worship the word of
God is so clear" that Church decisions would be supported, as the
banishment of Anne Hutchinson was supported by Governor Winthrop, a
governor as well as minister of the Church. And they wanted the logic
taught at the college to trickle down through sermons to the
unsophisticated layman, for logic was seen as a corrective to sinful
passions and heresies, which might wreak havoc upon the established
order. Mori son sees the founding of Harvard as the creation of a
bulwark of the intellect "in a country where social and economic 115 conditions fostered crude materialism, pietistic conceit, and complacement ignorance," but it can also be seen as a bulwark for maintaining the pietistic social order and the place of the ministers on top of this order.
Although we have not considered it in this light, the Puritan piety, as well as Protestantism in general, ironically nurtured individualism by its emphasis on the personal relationship God had with each individual, "who in the final analysis had no other responsibility but his own welfare." While it was assumed there was only one correct interpretation of the Bible and God's plan, some individuals could not be prevented from concluding that since it was their own salvation which was at stake, the interpretation should be their own. To combat this, Protestant theologians developed
increasingly elaborate systems of "proof" to safeguard the "right"
interpretation from the many wrongs ones. In establishing Harvard the
founders were protecting against such "misguided" individualism and
thereby protecting the pietistic social order itself.*^'
This brings us to our second point-~the organization of the
college and its curriculum that would maintaih this orthodoxy. It was
not enough for the studeht at Harvard to take in "the vast quantity of
received orthodox information"; he was also expected to make use of
it. The curriculum was organized according to a doctrine called
"technologia," which was "an assertion that the arts direct conduct to
ends enunciated by God."^® Whatever was seen as "unserviceable" for
translating the will of God into rules and precepts for action was 116 ruled out. Logic in order words was primarily addressed to the organization of knowledge rather than inquiry or speculation. To be learned was the logical system of interpretation that had been developed over the previous decades by Calvinist theoreticians, and the essential point conveyed was that the right doctrine had already been deduced. All that was left was the essential task of applying it to one's life and to society at large.
Puritans would have been surprised to know that over the next two centuries their educational ideas were attacked for their lack of utility, since to them they were eminently utilitarian; theirs was an education in how to make a world in keeping with God's will. As many
Harvard theses would repeat during the seventeenth century: "Art is a method of various precepts useful to life."^^ In this they were echoing the words of William Ames, the teacher of their ancestors at
Cambridge, who had written: "Every art consists of rules, whereby some Act of the creature is directed.To Miller, the ingeniousness of this approach lies in "its integrating conduct with the very
definition of knowledge." And he concludes that "there can be no doubt
that Protestantism in its Calvanist form encouraged the shift of
emphasis in theology and philosophy from contemplation to action, from
beatitude to utility." Having prescribed "the limits and ends of all
disciplines and faculties" the Puritans came to believe that there was
no need for "metaphysics as distinct from other disciplines," and in
1653 theses metaphysicae disappeared in the Harvard commencement 31 exercises, and theses technologicae were added the following year. 117
To the Puritan the imponderables of knowledge had been pondered and organized; the purpose of higher education was to inculcate in the student this way of seeing the world.
The desire for such inculcation and the attendant power of control was evident for years to come in the lay board of trustees and the development of the "Collegiate Way." Jergen Herbst suggests that historians, such as Morison and Rudolph, have not looked closely at the governmental structure of the early colleges. In the case of
Harvard they have inferred from curriculum similarities with Emmanuel
Col 1 ege--where many of the Puritan elite were originally schooled— that the American college was modeled after the English, with some changes made out of necessity. To Daniel Boorstin lay control was just good old Yankee ingenuity at work: "...lay boards of control helped marshal...limited resources and kept the college in touch with the whole community, without whose support there would have been no college at all."^^ However, as Herbst points out, lay boards of control had long been a characteristic of Protestant education, stemming from the desire of these reformers to bring educational institutions under the control of representatives of the civil and ecclesiastical order. Before 1636, such boards were operating in
Geneva, Leyden, and Edinburgh as well as in the post Reformation
English grammar schools. Given the Calvinist insistence upon
orthodoxy, one might well infer that the board members had more in
mind than simply marshaling the support of the community. 118
As for the collegiate Way of Living," Morison suggests "it was only by living as members of the same collegiate community, in constant association with one another and their tutors, that the young men could really be educated." This rosy image of a community of scholars takes on a different coloration in David A11mendinger's description of communal dining at Harvard.
Communal dining in this style involved much more than convenience and economy. Commons was an instrument of discipline, manners and power. The Harvard laws of 1734 required students to sit in their places, "behave themselves decently and orderly," and wait for the blessing before eating, "and whosoever shall be rude or clamorous at such times, or shall go out of the Hall before thanks be returned. Shall be punished by one of the tutors, not exceeding five shillings."^^
This was how "young men could really be educated," and why Cotton
Mather spoke so approvingly of the "Collegiate Way," for it was a way
of overseeing the manners and morals of the students, and of
"protecting" them from the vices of the surrounding community.
Learning at Harvard was, from its founding, subservient to the
Puritans' emphasis on remaking the world in accordance with God's
plan, their reliance on compulsion and regulation in doing so, their
tendency to reduce knowledge to make it more useful to enacting the
plan, their intolerance of any opinions that contradicted the one true
Christian way, and their dislike of intellectual novelty. Certainly
when learning came to challenge orthodoxy, as it did in 18th century
Harvard, it had advanced too far for the true Puritan s taste. He had
no desire to perpetuate this learning to posterity and switched his 119 allegiance to Yale, which, in Rudolph's words "proceeded to make a place for itself in the sun by being what it was said Harvard had promised to be—a safe, sound institution where the faith of the fathers was carefully protected."35
Conclusion
While liberalism often is portrayed as a rejection of what I have been describing, it is rather the case that liberalism grew out of Puritanism and retained much of its spirit. All the Puritan virtues were retained in the Protestant work ethic as was the Puritan emphasis upon reasoned self-control. Liberalism continued the shift in emphasis in religion and philosophy from contemplation to action and retained the Puritan sense that right reasons leads to right action. And liberalism retained the Puritan zeal for perfecting society, but put its faith in science rather than Biblical revelation for determining the outline of God's plan. 120
FOOTNOTES r T Mori son. The Intellectual Life of Colonial Npw En|La^(4th Ed.) (New York: New York University Press, 1$70)—FTF"
(Ch1cago^";:rve^snyyf^c^a^^^^^^ 3 Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Exoerience (Npw York: Random House, 1966)7^p. 3.---
4perry Miller (Ed.), The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (Garden City, Anchor, T%'h), pp. 1-5.-^- 5 As quoted in Frederick Rudolph, The American Colleoe and University (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. CT!-^^-
^Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectual ism in America (New York* Vintage, 1963), p. 64. ^ --
^Boorstin, op. cit., p. 8.
®Perry Miller, The New England Mind (New York: MacMillan. 1939), p. 7. -
^Ibid., p. 51.
10 Ibid., p. 55. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.
^^Ibid., p. 67.
^^As quoted in Ibid., p. 114.
15 Ibid., p. 68.
^^Ibid., p. 66.
^^Ibid., p. 87; Miller, The American Puritans, pp. 48-49.
^^Morison, op. cit., p. 31.
^^Miller, The New England Mind, p. 87.
20 Ibid., p. 76. 121
21lbid.
.^^Samuel Eliot Mori son. Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridae MA: Harvard University Press, OT/), pp. 18-19.-^ ’
23 Ibi d. P4 ^^Miller, op. cit., p. 99. 25, .Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience 1607-1783 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 38-39.- 26 Mori son. The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, p. 29. 27 Miller, op. cit., p. 67. 28 Ibid., pp. 162-173.
29 Ibid., p. 173.
30 I bi d.
31 Ibid., p. 161.
'^^Boorstin, op. cit., p. 177.
oo Jergen Herbst, "The Three American Colleges: Schools of the Reformation," in Donald Flemming and Bernard Bailyn (Eds.), Perspectives in American History, Vol. VIII.
^^David F. Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York, 1975).
35 Frederick Rudolph, op. cit., p. 10. CHAPTER V
LIBERALIZING LIBERAL EDUCATION
In the first chapter I described the "liberal mind" and its ideology that colors and shapes our present day thinking. In this chapter I will outline how the liberal ideology developed in this country and also trace its incursion into higher education, showing how it has become our prevailing mode of educational thought.
The cornerstone of the liberal ideology has always been the primacy of the individual and his or her "natural rights" over and against those in authority. The liberal tradition in American education--as distinct from the tradition of liberal education—has most importantly been the gradual incorporation of this principle of liberty into the thought and structure of higher education. Along with this principle of liberty came a whole set of related assumptions and emphases, developed largely by Locke and the 18th century philosophes of the Enlightenment. Liberalism is characterized by the secular nature of its thought, its faith in science, its acceptance of capitalistic individualism, and its emphasis upon future possibilities and new knowledge rather than traditional arrangements of thought.
Another point to keep in mind is that our present day sense of this ideology has been influenced by the natural equalitarianism of
American history. Classical 1 iberalism was not democratic, and the
European philosophes tended not to share Rousseau's optimism about
122 123
human nature. However, our interpretations of the Enlightenment have
tended to stress both equality and optimism about human nature, and
our liberalism has become democratic.
In the last chapter I focused on the Puritan perspective which
is necessary to understand because the liberalization of American
higher education has largely been a matter of replacing the Puritan
perspective with that of the liberal Enlightenment. Just such a shift
in perspectives led to the rise of the universities in the late 19th century. This process of liberalization freed the concept of liberal education from the Puritan emphasis on discipline and piety but led to
a new set of emphases, and a new way of thinking that has distorted
and confused the concept of liberal education as much as the Puritans
did.
My chapter begins with a description of the origins of the
liberal ideology in the thought of Locke and the philosophers who
succeeded him. I will then describe the interplay among Puritanism,
Classical liberalism, and American equal itarianism which made 19th
century liberalism largely a liberal Puritanism wrapped in democratic
rhetoric. I will then discuss the three stages of the liberalization
of higher education: The first stage was a period of the gradual
incursion of Enlightenment thought into higher education, and the
formulation of an enlightened liberal vision of higher education as a
challenge to the vision of the conservative Puritan. The second stage
began after the Civil War when laissez faire liberalism, in the form
of the elective principle, opened up the classical college to become a 124 university in accordance with the enlightened liberal vision. The third stage began in this century with John Dewey's reconstruction of liberalism which gave "liberal education" a whole new meaning.
The chapter will also emphasize the difficulties traditional humanists faced earlier in the century trying to revitalize the tradition of liberal education amidst the burgeoning universities.
Dewey's influence added an entirely new dimension to the problems the humanists faced, for while they were trying to renovate the traditional concept of liberal education, Dewey was proposing an entirely new model, from a new perspective.
John Locke and the Enlightenment Theory of Progress
John Locke: Progenitor of the Modern Liberal Mind
Though the word "liberalism" was not used until the 19th
century, its fundamental principles can be traced to John Locke.
Locke lived through a period of great political turmoil in England,
turmoil infused with religious hostility between Protestants and
Catholics, as well as between the Anglican Church and its own Puritan
faction, and other Protestant sects. Locke sought a principle of
political legitimacy that was based neither upon divine right nor
tradition.
In A Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, Locke
argued that the authority of government derives from the consent of 125 the governed, and that government's sole purpose is to protect the hatural rights of property, to protect the interests of the mercantile class, of which he was a part, from a government dominated by nobles and the king. In ascribing natural rights to individuals, Locke initiated a new idea in political philosophy, and gradually these
"rights" would expand to include freedom of the press and free speech as liberalism evolved.^
Locke's thought was modern in that he based his arguments upon natural law rather thah upon God's will or tradition, and he made the political event which had given him the freedom to publish the
Treati se, the Revolution of 1689, seem a triumph of natural law. In
the preface to the Treatise Locke stated that the new king of England,
William of Orange, was "the only one of all lawful governments" to
govern by the consent of the people.^ The revolution could have been
viewed simply as one group of nobles overthrowing another, but Locke
gave the event a new and different meaning. In the minds of the
philosophes who came after him it would signify progress in human
affairs, a first step towards an international community of nations
governed by the consent of the people.'^
Locke was also modern in his emphasis on religious toleration,
which he believed not only humane but also necessary for political
stability; a theory of knowledge based upon empirical observation; and
an emphasis on an education that is useful and pays attention to
student interests. Over time these educational emphases would become
magnified, even distorted, and certain of Locke s overstatements were 126 used to represent h1s views, e.g., "of all men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education," and "I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water Itself."'' In such statements lie the beginnings of the liberal's faith In education as the primary Instrument for perfecting society. It Is Important to note, though, that Locke's emphasis on a practical education was particularly aimed at those people who were not destined by social class to become gentlemen.
This is significant because Lockeian liberalism is rooted in the assumption that only a few will be sufficiently educated to be reasonable enough to govern. Locke was not a democrat, and he addressed his educational essay to the "gentlemen" rather than to
"those of the meaner sort." He looked to the gentlemen, for if they
"are by their education once set right, they will quickly bring all the rest into order.Thus, Locke's sense of liberal education, like the American Puritans' was an education based upon the classics, and his primary criticism of this education was that too much time was spent in rote memorization of Latin and in disputations.^
Just as Locke was not a democrat, neither were most of the philosophes who succeeded him in the 18th century. They shared with him the emphasis upon the secularization of ideas and politics, the attendant emphasis on reason and science, the toleration of religious differences, and the faith in the power of education, for at least the few if not the many. 127
Lib6rd1is[n and the Theory of Progress
In the 13th century philosophes such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and our own Franklin and Jefferson further developed and publicized the modern mind as in Locke. Most notably they developed a theory of
progress which included a faith in the perfectibility of society.
Central to the philosophers thought was the question of social
organization. As Henry Steele Commanger has pointed out, what
distinguished the philosophe from the philosopher was that the former
was interested in "those truths which might be useful here and now,"
while the philosopher carried on a "search for truth which was both
universal and permanent."^ For useful truths, the philosophes
particularly looked to science. Though Locke had influenced their
thinking, they based their theory of progress upon the science of
Newton. Following Newton's conception of natural law, which had
influenced Locke as well, they believed that society could be
organized in such a way as to allow for the continuous improvability
of the human condition, if in the process mankind could be freed from
the superstitions of organized religion and tradition. With the
noteable exception of Rousseau, the European philosophes did not have
a particularly high estimate of human nature--no higher than
Locke's--but their faith in science was sufficient for them to believe
that society could be organized to become more humane despite the
Q limitations of human nature.°
The philosophes' emphasis on enlightened social organization was
always interwoven with Lockeian political theory in the evolution of 128 liberalism. In the course of such evolution, however, emphases and interpretations changed, and it will be helpful to keep the general nature of these changes in mind. While both 19th and 20th century liberalism share the assumption that society will progress if it is organized in accordance with natural law, the interpretation of the right social organization and education has changed as society has become more complex and democratic. To the classic liberal, natural law suggested that laissez faire economics and politics formed the best approach to increasing the wealth of nations and in turn developing a more humane society. As Kenneth Dolbeare has stated, classical liberalism "emphasized self-interest as the principle motivational force in social life."^ The classic liberal believed in giving this motivation free reign, based upon the argument that laissez faire economics expressed the natural law of the marketplace.
As Adam Smith had argued in 1776, organized interests, such as the guilds and the privileged companies, were bad for society since they worked against the natural law of the market. Capitalism was fit into the Enlightenment vision of progress and gave material substance to this sense of progress. Enlightenment humanitarianism also had a
place in this theory, but was guided by the principle of laissez faire
as well. The classic liberal tended to believe that education,
charity, and personal matters in general should be left to private
initiative, using the increasing wealth of the free market economy.
This sense of liberalism peaked in the rugged individualism of the
late 19th century. 129
The rapid urbanization, industrialization, and democratization
of American life in the late 19th early 20th centuries gave rise to a
new interpretation of natural law. In John Dewey's view, mankind did
not best survive as individuals but as collective groups, and the
rugged individualist was not an answer to social problems but a source
of them. While the classic liberal believed government should do as
little as possible, the 20th century liberal would place increasing
emphasis on the positive use of state power both to regulate the marketplace and to create a more humanitarian society through support
of educational and social programs.
The hineteenth century liberal viewed liberalism education as
central to progress, but it was an education aimed at developing
stauch individualists who would lead in the direction of the
enlightened society. The liberal vision of education in this century
is far more pervasive and the liberal's reliance upon it much greater.
Education will control the "future through shaping the thought,
action, and character of its citizens.In this all pervasive sense
of an education in liberalism, the traditional concept of liberal
education has largely disintegrated. It is this disintegration that
we will now trace.
Liberalism in the Young Republic
The histories written in this century have too often been
written from what Clarence Karier has called a liberal humanitarian
perspective in which the liberal, the enlightened, and the democratic 130 all blend together into a theory of progress which, in turn, is implicitly equated with the good. As commonly told, the story becomes one of ascension from the somber darkness of Puritanism into the light of the liberal democratic Enlightenment.^^ Such liberal histories obscure the Lockeian roots of liberalism and its general compatibility with Puritanism. They also tend to ignore the fact that Jefferson's liberalism was elitist and that the college presidents who led the rise of the universities were liberal Puritans. It was precisely their Puritanism that provided the zeal with which they sold the idea of higher education to a public largely indifferent to it, if not hostile.
Therefore, in this section I will describe 19th century
liberalism by suggesting how it evolved out of the interplay between
Puritanism, the Enlightenment, capitalism, and the equalitarian nature
of the American context. In broad ways I will describe similarities
and distinctions among the liberal and conservative Puritans,
democratic liberals and the populist democrats. I emphasize the broad
nature of these distinctions since they will necessarily be
simplistic, but they must be drawn if we are to free ourselves from
the blinders of 20th century liberal humanitarianism.
Let us begin by placing Lockeian liberalism in the American
context with the help of Louis Hartz. In The Liberal Tradition in
America, Hartz argues that our liberalism especially begins and ends
with Locke, that we have not progressed in terms of our liberalism but
have simply maintained it in the face of changing circumstances. The 131 colonists even before the American Revolution were "born free" with the Lockeian principles of private property, the atomistic society, popular sovereignty, and natural rights already established. For
Hartz, the outstanding point to keep in mind is that American liberalism had no feudal system to struggle against, no aristocracy for the liberal to assault in the name of the people.As a consequence, after the Revolution Lockeian liberals like John Adams and the federalists were left in the awkward position of imnediately becoming conservative, facing too many Americans who mistakenly took the rhetoric of equality to include them. Alan Heimert points out that when it came time to develop a constitution Adams was most concerned with placing checks on the power of the multitude, in spite of years of arguing for the arousal of the "people" as a control upon arbitrary government.
Adams was a liberal Puritan and his view reflects that of the
Puritan elite in general, whether liberal or conservative. What distinguished the Boston "liberals" from more conservative Puritans was their religious beliefs not their political ones. The Boston
Puritans were "liberal" because they based their Calvinism upon
empirical observation and reason, believing that "God's will could
best be derived, not from His word, but from His works.Their
particular emphasis on reason also made them more receptive to the
Enlightenment emphasis on "useful" education based upon the sciences
and other modern subjects, though they preferred to keep "Harvard a 132 house of learning under the spirit of religion" rather than be secular in nature.^^
Politically, the liberal and conservative Puritan elite were united in their fear of the irrational or selfish multitudes and their desire to keep government in the hands of the well-born and well-educated. The liberal, or rationalist, clergy of Boston was at best tepid in its support of the Revolution. They "were in the
1770's, nearly to a man, if not outright Tories, then praying that the magistrates and merchants to whose judgment they deferred would subdue
the revolutionary enthusi asm. Over the previous fifty years the
Puritan elite had faced enough revolutionary enthusiasm in the form of
the Great Awakening.
The Puritan elite were also liberals in terms of capitalist
economics. Calvinism had always been congenial to capitalism, and
most of the American Puritans had come from the mercantile class in
England. Although the early Puritan theocracy held capitalism in
check, by the 19th century they too tended to believe in laissez faire
economics. Henry May has summed up the situation: Organized
Protestantism supported the dominant economic beliefs and institutions
even more unanimously than it accepted the existing forms of
government.Calvinism had always seen value in the hard work and
saving of capitalism, and the protestant work ethic is perhaps the
most obvious legacy of this Calvinism. 133
All Of this suggests that by the time of the Revolution
liberalism and Puritanism were hardly opposites. Such tension as
there was lay between the Puritan elite and the democratic liberals
such as Jefferson and Tom Paine, between the Boston view of liberalism
and that of Philadelphia. Jefferson welcomed the French Revolution
Adams decried It and Its slogan: "Liberty, equality, fraternity."
Jefferson was optimistic about government In the hands of the multitudes; Adams was pessimistic. We now see Jefferson as the
liberal and Adams as the conservative.
Such a distinction is hardly accurate though, since Jefferson's liberalism was as elitist as that of Adams. Jefferson shared with the
liberal Puritans the belief that the nation needed an elite of highly educated leaders. The most significant difference between Jefferson and the liberal Puritans was their disagreement about whether this elite should be a "natural aristocracy" culled from all classes or should continue to be made up of the rich and well-born.
The significant similarity of Jefferson's liberalism and the
Puritans' is most evident in contrast to the populist or Jacksonian
"liberal" who saw no need for specialized training for democratic leadership, and viewed Jefferson's University of Virginia as simply another bastion of privilege. Yet even here the distinction blurs when we realize that a typical Jacksonian was one who had almost, but not quite, succeeded in becoming privileged himself, and that "every stroke of his axe and hoe made him a capitalist. Richard 134
Hofstadter states: in the Jacksonian period the democratic upsurge was closely linked to the ambitions of the small capitalist."22
These distinctions and their tendency to blur suggest a far more complex situation than that presented in liberal humanitarian histories in which heroes and villans are clear. My own summary, though necessarily oversimplified, would emphasize these points: In the 18th and 19th centuries a vision of liberalism education was developed by liberal Puritans and Jeffersonians who largely agreed
upon the kind of higher education America should have. The vision was
opposed by the conservative Puritans who controlled the colleges and
soon would also be opposed by the Jacksonian democrats who resented
their exclusion. The enlightened liberal vision of higher education
emphasized "usefulness," but only a very high minded "usefulness."
The enlightened liberals were no more inclined to let the people
decide what higher education should be than were the conservative
Puritans.
However, in order to sell their vision of an intellectual
aristocracy to the Jacksonians, whose support they needed, the
liberals increasingly portrayed this vision in terms that most
Americans could appreciate. At a time when "being good" was giving
way to "making good"--as Randolph Bourne describes the nineteenth
century--the liberals promoted their vision as a vehicle for economic
and social mobility. 135
Higher Education Before the Civil War
Prior to the Civil War, higher education emphasized the conservative Puritan values of discipline and piety. The broad thrust of the liberal's efforts was to replace the Puritan emphasis on the supernatural and biblical revelation with an emphasis on the natural world and reason. The liberal tradition was centered upon efforts to free higher education from the influence of religious orthodoxy, and was most clearly represented by Jefferson's enlightened liberal vision of higher education embodied in the University of Virginia. Such liberal reformers and their enlightened views had only very limited success during the period before the Civil War, but they initiated the direction higher education would take in the latter half of the 19th century and so must be understood.
Even prior to the Revolution the Enlightenment vision had made a few inroads into the eight colleges of the colonies. The broadest influence upon the curriculum was that of Newtonian empiricism, largely because even the conservative Calvinist ministry tended to believe that empirical science could be harmonized with scripture. By
1766, six of the eight colleges supported professorships of mathematics and natural phi 1osophy.The particular bent of
Philadelphia towards the Enlightenment is suggested by the
establishment in 1756 of a three year course of study at the College
of Philadelphia based upon the principle of usefulness. The
curriculum placed considerable emphasis on the mastery of written and
oral English and upon training for government service. Altogether 136 about a third of the program was devoted to science and practical studies. According to Frederick Rudolph, this was the first systematic course of studies in America that did not derive from the medieval tradition nor serve a religious purpose.
There were several attempts at reforming the colleges along liberal Enlightenment lines between the Revolution and the Civil War.
However, the ascendancy of the Enlightenment vision, asserted by
Rudolph, was a very slow ascendancy. Most of the attempts at reform were short lived, stifled by Puritan conservatism within the colleges and "a lack of any overwhelming popular demand for a new kind of higher education.The reforms are significant however in what they suggest of a new vision of higher education, and we will discuss three of those attempts, Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia,
George Ticknor's reforms at Harvard, and the experiment at Amherst
College to integrate the new studies with the old into a core curriculum. Jefferson's vision is significant in its articulation of
the democratic liberal rationale for higher education that we still
use today, while Ticknor's vision seems to have had more influence and
is a clearer indication of the interests of liberal academics. The
Amherst experiment illustrates an attempt to reconcile the liberal
vision with that of traditional liberal education.
In order to keep these attempts at reform in perspective, we
should note that while the number of colleges increased in this period
from 8 to over 160, most of these colleges had only a handful of
students and were in continuous financial difficulty. Over "seven 137 hundred colleges died in the United States" before 1860.26 jhus. while the liberal reformers were envisioning the development of great universities most colleges were barely surviving.
Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia, which opened in
1825, embodied all the elements of the modern liberal university, including an emphasis on specialized knowledge. It was relatively free of sectarian control, gave students some freedom in their pursuit of knowledge, and aimed at placing them in a "high state of science."^' Jefferson also provided the rationale for state support of higher education by claiming that the central purpose of the university was to train democratic leaders. Today in discussions of higher education we tend to blend together Jefferson's emphasis upon an enlightened citizenry and training leaders for a democracy, but in
Jefferson's time they were separate issues. In fact, in the legislative proposal for the university, Jefferson had included a system of public primary schools and academies, but the legislature rejected that part of the proposal.2®
Jefferson's organization of the university emphasized specialization. The university was divided into eight schools encompassing knowledge old and new: the ancient languages, modern languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy and medicine, moral philosophy and law. While students were allowed to proceed at their own pace and choose the order of courses, if they wished a degree they were expected to select one school and, once they 29 did so, they were restricted to taking courses within that school. 138
Student freedom was an aspect of Jefferson's philosophy, but greater value was placed on mastering a particular area of knowledge. The democratic leader was already becoming a specialist.
George Ticknor's reforms at Harvard in the 1820s seem another indication of the liberal bent towards specialized expertise. After four years studying in Germany and traveling through Europe, Ticknor joined the Harvard faculty in 1819. A few years later he proposed that the Harvard instructional staff be divided into departments of study, that students have a degree of selection in their courses, that classes be divided according to proficiency, and that everything be taught more thoroughly.^® The reforms were strongly opposed by the faculty and finally established only in Ticknor's department of modern languages, but, according to R. Freeman Butts, Ticknor's reforms were in the long run more practically influential than Jefferson's. Both
Ticknor and Jefferson emphasized student freedom, but Ticknor seemed to have little sense of Jefferson's vision of the true place of a university in a democracy, while Jefferson had little notion of
Ticknor's penchant for methods of attaining the most advanced scholarship. Eventually American higher education adopted Ticknor's emphasis on scholarship using Jefferson's rationale of democratic leadership.®^ The experiment at Amherst College in the 1820s represents an attempt to integrate the old with the new; it was a compromise between conservative and liberal Puritans. The stimulus
for the change seems to have been the fear that the colleges were "in
danger of being left behind, in the rapid march of improvement," as 139 stated in a faculty report. The report eventually led to a two-year experiment in which a parallel course of study was added that emphasized the modern languages and sciences, while many subjects were shared with those taking the regular classical course. The experiment was abandoned after two years due to lack of funds, lack of student interest, and an "undercurrent of faculty skepticism" about the project, according to Rudolph.
From these three examples, it seems that as to the question of liberal education, the energy of the liberals pointed in a new direction altogether and the energy of the conservatives was aimed at maintaining the status quo.
The problem facing these reformers was the same: either the colleges would survive upon their religious zeal, or try to court the
public by emphasizing a more useful course of studies. The humanist
sense of liberal education that I have talked about was hardly a
consideration, for, after all, there was no particular demand for it
nor any particular advocate. The central question was whether the
colleges would remain small, pious, and on the periphery of American
life or whether they could be made into something that more of the
public wanted or believed they wanted. The central concern for the
liberal was how to bring the latter alternative about.
The Dilemma of the Liberal Reformers
Until late In the 19th century, the liberal reformers faced the
dilemma of promoting their vision of the liberal university against 140 the opposition of conservative Puritans who controlled the colleges, the hostility of the Jacksonian democrats, and the general indifference of the public at large. The year 1828 was significant in terms of these struggles for it was the year of both the Yale Report and the election of Andrew Jackson. As Rudolph states, "the Yale
Report put the weight of a great American college behind things as they were." Mental discipline through the study of the classics as well as student recitations was defended and the "ludicrous attempt" to emulate the German universities were disavowed. Harvard and
Virginia might stir up some discussion of educational reform, but neither exerted the national influence of Yale or Princeton, which supported Yale's conservative stand. These two were training many of the enthusiastic founders of new colleges in the West and South and clergymen who would become their presidents.
On the other front the liberals along with the conservatives had to face Jacksonian democrats who saw the colleges perpetuating old privileges rather than training citizens for democratic leadership.
The liberal and democrat views of education were at odds in several ways. To begin with, the Jacksonian believed no special education was necessary for an individual to serve in public office. Secondly, while the Jeffersonians were in favor of publicly supported lower education as well as higher education, the democrats noticed the distinctly unegalitarian education offered at the University of
Virginia. An editorial in a Virginia newspaper of 1845 reflects the
Jacksonian spirit in criticizing the state for using public money for 141
"instructing from one hundred to one hundred and fifty youths, all of whom have the means of finishing their course through their own resources.The democratic reputation of the University dropped one step further when, in 1856, the legislature revoked the room and board provision for state scholarship students because, it was alleged, it encouraged "idle habits.
Another reason the Jacksonians were suspicious of the colleges stemmed from the Dartmouth College case of 1819, in which the Supreme
Court ruled that privately founded colleges were private corporations not subject to control of the state even if they received state support. The liberal applauded this decision as protection from the misguided ideas of the multitudes, while the Jacksonians did not want to support colleges they could not control. The result was that legislative generosity fell to a low point.
The Jacksonians believed that institutions should serve all equally, and this did not fit well with the ideal of a university which obviously only some could attend. The frustration the
Jeffersonian felt with the Jacksonian is well illustrated by the
situation faced by President Philip Lindsley of the University of
Nashville. Arriving in Nashville in 1824 with a vision of a great
university in the making, he realized by 1829 that was not what the
natives had in mind:
The levelling system, which is so popular and captivating with the multitude, may be made to operate in two ways, with equal success.. .Colleges and universities, as implying odious pre-eminence, may be prevented from growing up among us: or 142
©very petty village school may be dignified with the name and legal attribute of a college.^'
The liberal's ideal of the university was beset on all sides, and the liberal was in a tricky situation. He needed to persuade the democrat to believe in his ideal. In his baccalaureate speech of 1829,
Lindsley sounded the theme that would eventually convince the democrat. He argued that the tendency to associate higher education with privilege was a relic of the European idea of class which was not relevant in America. Thus began the notion of higher education as an invitation to achievement in an open and mobile society--Horatio
Alger, welcome to the university.
In order for the liberal vision to become believable, the college had to change from being largely a ritualistic endeavor in which students received diplomas after four years (if they hadn't been too unruly)," to a "creation of a professional relationship between professors and students willing to compete with other students for meritorious recognition."^® The change would produce what Burton
Bledstein has called a "culture of professionalism,"®^ and required a change in the attitudes of the professors, the students, and in the institutions themselves. Professors needed to see their work as vocations requiring advanced learning rather than being administrative and supervisory positions. Students had to think in terms of personal identity and destiny rather than the esprit de corp of the dormitory or the class, and they had to accept the idea of written examinations which had not been a part of the college experience. (Harvard did not 143
conduct its first written exam until 1833, and it was not until 1842
that President Wayland proposed written examinations at Brown.)
Altogether the colleges had to be reshaped to fit what Bledstein has called the "drive for self-distinction and self-assertion" that characterized the 19th century man.^^
This movement towards rugged individualism seems to have been
nurtured by liberal Puritanism. William Ellery Channing, the leader of the Boston liberal clergy wrote early in the century: "The only elevation of a human being consists in the exercise, growth, energy of
the higher principles and powers of the soul."^^ Though Unitarians,
such as Channing, are credited with replacing the Puritan emphasis on depravity with an image of the excellence of human nature, there was a certain burden that accompanied this new vision. In a pinch, the early Puritan could throw up his hands at his own depravity, see his
dire need for the Grace of God and beg mercy for his undeserving soul.
But the liberal Puritan blessed with natural excellence was expected
to elevate himself and to show through his works that he had done so.
This opportunity for individual elevation became transmuted by
Ralph Waldo Emerson into the right of every individual to his chance
of success according to his own uniqueness. Called the "Horatio Alger
of Education" by Gary Wills,'^^ Emerson strongly influenced audiences
of college students and young men's associations in the 1840s and 50s.
Andrew Dickinson White, who would become the president of Cornell,
recalled that Emerson's lectures "made the greatest impression on me."
And Charles Eliot reportedly came to know Emerson's essays as well as 144
knew the Bihle. In lectures and essays Emerson told the young .en
W10 were trying to decide what to do with their llves-with al, that
natural excellence they were both with-that what was missing In
American education was an emphasis on each of them, the unique
interests and talents of each. He also excited them with a vision of
a distinctly American Intellectual culture, rather than one which
tamely submitted to a prescribed curriculum from the Old World. A new education would be based on "respecting the pupil," understanding that
"nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat Impossible to any other, and this makes him necessary to society." Therefore, education should be shaped so "that each is bound to discover what his faculty is. to develop it, and to use it for the benefit of mankind.
Thus was the vision that inspired many of those who would build the universities, and it was a vision that they in turn would sell to the public. Such individual drive for "self-distinction and self-assertion of the "captains of erudition" initiated the rise of the universities. As Laurence Veysey has stated: "During the early years of the American university movement, until about 1390, academic efforts burgeoned largely in spite of the public, not as the result of popular acclaim.Such individualism diluted the Jacksonian hostility to the budding universities, and at the same time, the universities broadened their curriculum options as public primary and high schools multiplied late in the century. The Jacksonian hostility towards the esoteric knowledge of the professional was assuaged by the 145 possibility that each could become a professional if he, and gradually she, had sufficient talent and will power. By the time of the Civil
War the liberal reformers had hardly solved their dilemna, but its hard edges had softened. The appeal of individualism, either
Emerson s version or the Horatio Alger version, provided a basis for an educational consensus between Jeffersonians and Jacksonians.
That this individualism contradicted the traditional belief in the value of a shared learning seemed to bother only the conservatives, but in the face of the rapid expansion of knowledge
they failed to develop a core curriculum that integrated the new with
the old. The conservative's stance had been to grudgingly allow new
courses to enter the curriculum while dropping none of the old ones, making all courses more superficial in nature. Even the experiment at
Amherst College seems to reflect a compromise between liberals and
conservatives rather than an example of a new core curriculum. As
individualism, in the form of the elective principle, gained greater
acceptance, core curriculum requirements were continuously reduced,
undermining the ideal of a shared 1 earning.
The Eliot Period--1869-1909
From the Civil War to the end of the century there were drastic
social and economic changes which aided in the creation of the liberal
university. This was a period of amazing growth in machine technology
and large scaled industry; the exploitation of the West proceeded
faster than ever, aided by the transcontinental railroad; urbanization 146 rapidly increased, and a growing middle class was preparing to pursue the "culture of professionalism."
These developments created a greater demand for more practical education and greater private and public funding for education at all levels. The number of public high schools, increased from 1,026 in
1870 to 6,005 by 1900, an indication of the growth and prosperity of the period. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 provided funding for the establishment of state schools of agriculture and engineering.
Some of these funds helped already established schools, such as
Michigan, Wisconsin, and California, expand. Accumulated wealth among the captains of industry provided funds to endow other colleges such as Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, and Tulane.^^
A number of energetic individuals fired by Emerson's words and their own desire to make their marks would, as presidents, make universities out of colleges: Eliot of Harvard, Noah Porter at Yale,
Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins, Andrew Dickinson White at
Cornell, Frederick Barnard at Columbia, James McCosh at Princeton,
James Burrill Angell at Michigan, and John Bascom at Wisconsin, were a number of what Thorsten Veblen would later sarcastically call the
"captains of erudition.These men were themselves partaking of the culture of professionalism, and they and their institutions were consciously competitive with each other. At mid-century they looked around them and saw what Henry James, son of William, would later say of the period, that most men of law, medicine, journalism, science, public service, and industry were not college educated. Their mission 147 was to Change this, to place higher education in the mainstream of American life.^®
There was also the pressure within the colleges to make more
room for the growing sciences and incipient social sciences, modern
languages, etc. The culture of professionalism was demanding the means for fair competition. As Rudolph notes: "Everywhere more attention was being paid to various sectioning, grading, and marking schemes as instruments of scholarly stimulation."^^ The conditions were finally ripe for the implementation of the liberal vision of higher education. In the process the idea of liberal education would be redefined, and since Harvard led in this redefinition, let us take a good look at what was happening there and at Charles Eliot, the foremost of the captains.
Eliot's presidency (1869-1909) spanned the emergence of the
American university and he is generally considered the most commanding figure in higher education in the last half of the 19th century.
Laurence Veysey has called him a "true liberal of his century," and the elective principle that he championed has been called by Rudolph
"the academic application of 19th century liberalism."^^
He began his career as a conscientious but unpopular teacher of chemistry at Harvard who showed little promise as a scholar, and he left after losing a bid for a professorship. However, he had shown considerable ability in all matters of administration, from devising written examinations to overseeing construction of a new building, and he left that impression as well.^^ In addition, Eliot had a vision of 148 the "New Education" which matched that of those who believed that
Harvard must expand with the country. As outlined in two articles in
the Atlantic Monthly in 1868, Eliot argued for a greater use of
electives to match student needs, more reasonable preparation for
practical pursuits, and the need for advanced study beyond
graduation,^^
Eliot's vision fit well with the course set by the previous
president, Thomas Hill, and many associated with Harvard wanted an
expansion and acceleration of what Hill had begun. Hill had expanded
electives in 1865 and 1867 , advocated the establishment of graduate
education, and spoke of liberal education not solely in terms of the
classics, but as creating an understanding of history, political
economy, and philosophy.
Those who favored Hill's reforms talked of foreign universities
as models, practical studies, and "a liberal enlargement of the list
of elective studies." Opponents were those who felt that a classical
education was the most important distinction between the college man
and the common man and anything diminishing it would lead to anarchy.
These men also relished the bonds formed between classmates and
generations of students who largely shared a common learning. But the
battle lines were not always clear-cut. There were differences among
those who favored change, such as that between the scientists who
disdained the talk "of a practical education" and those who saw
science in terms of its practicality. Another schism was between the
classicists and those who, while favoring literature over the
sciences, wished to expand the idea of liberal education to include 149 the modern languages and literatures. The attractiveness of Eliot's vision was that there seemed room for everybody; everyone's fear was that there was too much room for everyone else. After quite a bit of controversy, Eliot was selected president by the board of overseers.
Eliot wished to make Harvard into a university, of which there were none in this country in 1860 to his mind, though many, including
Harvard, used the title. Like Ticknor, Eliot had visited Germany and
France and was impressed by the range and variety of subjects offered
to students for their choice, and he wished to provide the same at
Harvard. He also firmly believed that a young man could choose his
own course of study better than anyone else could for him, and that
all non-vocational courses had equal value as long as they were well
taught and studied. All of these beliefs pointed to the use of the
elective principle which Eliot made famous and to some infamous.
With the elective principle Eliot was able to free the hold of
the classical subjects on the curriculum and to make room for the new
fields of knowledge--modern literatures, sciences, history, and
political economy. He was also able to attract donations for
professorships in these subjects, and teacher to teach them. For
example. Harvard's first professorships in history and political
economy were endowed in 1869 and 1876 respectively. With the
development of more specified student interests and departments, Eliot
could also build a graduate school which was begun in 1873. This last
was against much resistance from the faculty but Eliot encountered
resistance on most of his proposals from those who did not want the 150 familiar patterns to change. Over his forty-year tenure Eliot's patience and perseverance won out. He either wore down, out-argued or in the end, outlasted his opponents. During his administration the number of faculty members increased from 60 to 600 and the institution's endowment increased from slightly more than two million to twenty million dollars.^^
Eliot continuously wrung faculty concessions for electives, until by 1894 only freshmen had a required course, and that was one year of rhetoric. Eliot's Harvard would also do away with compulsory chapel and even temporarily abandon attendance regulations. Eliot's foremost theme was student liberty, and he followed this principle even when it forced him to tolerate things he did not like, such as the undergraduate clubs which were snobbish and used sadistic initiation practices.^^
Yet Eliot was still a Puritan as well. At the center of his educational thought was the same emphasis on moral character building that was found in more conservative presidents, like Noah Porter at
Yale and James McCosh at Princeton. What made him liberal was that he believed the exercise of liberty built character more effectively than external discipline. As he addressed the Harvard freshmen in 1906:
Do you want to be automata?...The will is the prime motive oower, and you can only train your wills in freedom.^'
In arguing for this student freedom, however, Eliot assumed a genteel, moral context established by the examples set by the faculty. Eliot placed a great emphasis on the selection of his faculty, and he looked 151 for men who took an active interest in public affairs, but did so in a gentlemanly fashion (he is even known to have vetoed at least one candidate because his wife was considered ill-bred). True to the liberal belief in the marketplace of ideas, Eliot often hired men whose views were contrary to his own, as long as he believed they provided a good moral influence for the students. With the liberal's vision of progress, Eliot saw the university "as the paradigm for the eventual world...teaching diverse kinds of men to express their differences in an atmosphere of self-control."^® In this the professor as exemplar of manners and morals was key, and while he liked his professors to be both reasonable and restrained he also sought a strain of rugged individualism.
Eliot, the liberal Puritan, thought his students could build
their characters in an atmosphere of freedom, and he hoped the process would teach them self-control. As Mori son notes, "what he wished to
do in higher education was to apply in that field the shift in control
that Jefferson wished to apply to government, and Emerson in society
as a whole--the shift from external compulsion and discipline to
internal compulstion and discipline." He had none of Rousseau's
romanticism concerning human nature that would characterize later
liberals, and he expected that many students would misuse his elective
system. He wasn't concerned about those educational misfits: He
intended liberty primarily for the strong and able who knew what they h59 wanted and were willing to work for it. 152
He could speak as a democrat: "In a democracy the interests of the greater number will ultimately prevail, as they should," yet one has the sense that the "as they should" is largely a concession to the inevitable, what Veysey calls "the patrician's intelligent adjustment to a new threat from 'below'." His democracy was actually that of liberal individualism, democratic only to the extent that he allowed a wider variety of people to compete, both students and professors. As
E. K. Rand describes the Eliot period: "His remedy was to upset the hierarchy of the Arts and to put all academic subjects on a democratic level. Free field and no favor. Let the best art win. Liberte, egalite fraternite?"^^
How did Eliot's vision effect the practice and concept of liberal education? According to Rand, who studied at Harvard during the Eliot years: "Those of us who were in college in those days had no doubt that we were enjoying a liberal education. We were free to wander in whatever field invited." Rand's observations are particularly noteworthy because he would become a renowned classicist.
Eliot opened up the possibility for him to further develop his knowledge of the classics, just as for another student it might be chemistry or history. And Eliot encouraged his student's freedom by taking steps to improve teaching and give good teaching greater credit. Prior to Eliot students did not know who would teach a given course until the course began. Under Eliot, they not only knew who would teach the course but were encouraged by their president to choose the professor, not the course. 153
With the elective principle. Eliot abandoned the "scale of merit" in which students received only half as many merits for taking elective courses as required ones and which deducted merit points for poor conduct. In 1871, it was decided that "every instructor may assign his marks in such a manner as he shall judge most equitable and effective." And most importantly, a similar latitude was allowed in teaching methods, though since Eliot strongly disapproved of daily recitation, it had largely disappeared by 1880. Lectures, discussion, and Socratic colloquies between teacher and student became the prevailing methods. In 1886, a commencement speaker put Eliot's contribution to teaching in perspective:
Formerly, the only business of a teacher was to hear recitations, and make marks for merit. Now, he has the opportunity of teaching. This is one of the greatest educational discoveries of modern times—that the business of a teacher is to teach.
Thus Eliot opened up the possibilities of a liberal education more in keeping with the Greek spirit, and the ideal of "liberal culture" found a home at Harvard.
Eliot opened up Harvard to the possibilities of liberal culture, but he also planted the seeds of its demise. In opening Harvard up to growth and freedom, Eliot had redefined the cultured gentleman as one skilled in a particular area, thereby redefining the nature of liberal education as well. While holding on to the term, Eliot "liberalized" it, freed it from its attachment to the classics and, in effect, demoted them to a place equal to all other subjects which were
"liberally taught"—taught with the aim of culture or knowledge rather 154 than vocational preparation. He maintained the distinction between liberal and vocational studies, but only by broadening liberal studies beyond the recognition of conservatives and the advocates of "liberal culture." The situation was further confused by Eliot's tendency to speak for popular effect in terms of education for "utility" or
"efficiency." Eliot considered a course useful if it built character, but surely others felt he was speaking of vocations and careers. Such confusion was perhaps deliberate, even manipulative; it was certainly fruitful
If Rand and his friends could feel they were getting a liberal education it was because Eliot's Harvard was a combination of old and new. Until Eliot's last years the subjects required for admission were virtually unchanged and the classics still flourished in the pre-college education; there was a unifying bond resembling that of the old school. Also, Harvard was still small enough (about 1000 undergraduates in 1887) and the literary tradition sufficiently ingrained that, given freedom, students were more inclined to study the new humanities--modern languages, history, etc.—than they were either the sciences or incipient social sciences. Rand recollects;
"We felt that despite the diversity in the feast of learning that tempted us to different dishes, we were sitting at the same table.
Old and new were in a delicate balance in Eliot's day and in committing Harvard to continuous growth Eliot was threatening the equilibrium. Outside changes threatened as well. The curriculum of the high schools began to emulate the colleges in permitting elective 155
courses, and when Eliot dropped Greek as an entrance requirement the
effect was to further dilute the classical emphasis in the high
schools. The commoh learning that bound Rand's class within Harvard's diversity was rapidly eroding.
Meanwhile the graduate schools were coming into their own and
Eliot's attention was dangerously divided. While Eliot's primary focus was upon the teaching of undergraduates, he also wanted to keep
Harvard in the vanguard of the university movement. At Johns Hopkins
Daniel Coit Gilman gave graduate studies clear priority, and Eliot had no choice but to accept the competition and further develop Harvard's programs. Eliot's vision of a new liberal education seemed lost in the process of growth, specialization, and individualism.
At minimum, the idea of liberal education requires the presence of bonding elements, either a shared curriculum or a similar approach.
During Eliot's presidency the bonding elements were all left over from tradition, and his own energies were directed towards organizing the university in the service of individualism, in opposition to tradition.^^ Such emphasis on the individual and his liberty weakened the old bonding elements and offered no new ones to replace them.
With Eliot begins the idea that a liberal education is what each of us decides it is; liberal education is a private experience. Eliot's assumption that "authority curbs the will power of the individual" obscured the humanist's sense of authority, an authority that one submits freely to, "consents to undergo the ordeal of being fashioned, formed, shaped.Eliot's "individualistic persons" would become 156 isolated individuals incapable of revealing their individuality because individuality requires a cohesive community to judge this individuality. In 1942, E. K. Rand would nostalgically look back on his undergraduate days and complain: "Under President Eliot one might specialize; now one must." It was Eliot's liberal abolutism. his faith in individualism and science, and his rhetoric of utility that opened the door to the age of the specialist.
Liberal Education in the Aftermath
of the University Movement
The years 1908-1910 witnessed much talk about reassessing the direction of higher education and much criticism of the intellectual chaos in the curriculum brought about by the rapid growth of the Eliot period. Even the university builders seemed to be having sudden changes of heart. President Lowell, Eliot's successor, spoke of the need for "an intellectual and social cohesion" in the university, placed restrictions on student electives, and built dormitories to give greater social cohesion. At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson introduced a preceptorial system to develop closer ties between students and teachers and attempted to build a residential graduate school, which even then must have seemed like a quaint idea. There were other efforts to revitalize liberal education as well; central to them all was the idea of "liberal culture.
The elective principle and the secularization of higher education opened the way for a version of liberal education more in 157 keeping with the Greek spirit than that of Puritan discipline and piety. The redefined aim of this new version was often called
liberal culture," and, though its proponents tended to be sympathetic to mental discipline, they also emphasized the importance of maintaining our Western culture heritage, indeed even made a religion out of the idea of culture as developed by Matthew Arnold, who was often quoted. These advocates tended to emphasize the literary tradition and they were usually found in departments of English and other modern languages. They wrote a great deal about the course of higher education and "preached the same gospel of civilization" as did the editors of the nation's leading monthly magazines and the organizers of the fine arts in the major cities. As a result they were able to focus a considerable amount of attention on curricular issues.^®
The amount of attention given to the ideal of "liberal culture" is not necessarily a true indication of its importance. Its advocates had a cause and pushed it, but those in the educational center, the utilitarians and researchers, were doing quite well with the way things were going, and were not even sufficiently threatened by such talk as to respond seriously. Thus, began the somewhat schizophrenic discussion of liberal education in this century, in which the ideal has been given much attention precisely because it has so little effected the course of higher education. To paraphrase a comment by
Lionel Trilling, the more we hear talk about a tradition the more certain we can be that it is dead. A primary reason we have become 158 confused about the ideal of liberal education is that it has found little in the way of implementation, other than in a few classrooms, or an experimental program or college here or there. Higher educational philosophy has meant nothing compared to the guiding light of science and the "unspoken assumption that institutional rather than intellectual factors determine the central course of educational development."
The traditional humanist faced many problems trying to revive the idea of liberal education. First, the new universities were organized in accordance with individual pursuits rather than shared learning. Secondly, the equal status of areas of knowledge, which was
Eliot's original idea, turned into a reversal of the old order with the sciences on top. And thirdly, those who wised to maintain or revitalize the ideal of liberal education were divided among themselves about what it should be, and divided by their own individual interests. In this section I will elaborate upon each of these points, showing that part of the reason we have lost a sense of the ideal of liberal education is that almost nothing within the colleges and universities perpetuates it.
The new universities became as tied to the scientific method and the ideal of research as the old colleges had been to the classics.
Coupled with liberal individualism the ideal of advanced research in
pursuit of the truth established an organization geared for
specialization. The prominence science attained by the early 20th
century and the tendency of scientists to claim "possession of the 159 only truth” gave rise to an ideal of research and a scientism that undermined the traditional ideal of liberal education in several ways.
The model for research in science and other fields was found in the German university, which, since the beginning of the century, had stood for true scholarship. By the end of the century some 10,000
Americans had studied in Germany, and these German trained professionals came to dominate American colleges with their ideal of painstaking investigation. That the Americans either misunderstood the German method, or simply Americanized it, now seems clear, for underlying the German method was a sense of underlying spiritual unity, shared by scientists and philosophers, that did not survive the transplant to American soil. Veysey speculates that Americans combined a British philosophical empiricism with the German attention to particulars and made the practice of research into an "all- encompassing ideal.
The ideal of research and specialization pointed to the graduate school. By the 1890's, graduate schools developed an autonomous existence at a number of American campuses, most notably Harvard,
Columbia, Chicago, and Wisconsin. The undergraduate curriculum became preparation for the graduate, and this too undermined attempts at a shared liberal or general education. The esteem given graduate education reached a peak early this century when the board of trustees at Columbia University seriously considered disbanding the undergraduate college, considered worthless as compared to the new graduate school 160
Research became practically the only basis for the prestige of individual professors, departments, and universities. Although lengthy I quote the following from Edward Shils for I think it well illuminates the result of the emphasis upon research.
The effort to be among the best institutions or departments was spurred by the growing prominence of research. As long as universities and colleges confined themselves to teaching, to the formation of character and the "molding of men," they were visible only locally and to those who had direct contact with them. Few easily and widely recognized marks of accomplishment resulted from such pedagogical activities. However, achievements in research were discernible not so much by the general public as by the public consisting of other workers in the same or related fields. Colleagues at other universities were more effectively present in the minds of those academics who did research than was the case with those whose affections were given in the first instance to teaching. The audience of the latter was the student body, locally circumscribed; the audience for the former was national and international.'^
In this situation teaching, of course, is of little value. Against
this background the efforts to revive the tradition of liberal
education seemed little more than curious anomalies.
Real headway in reviving the tradition of liberal education
against the tendencies of the university would have required
considerable agreement among its advocates, which was hardly the case.
The defenders of liberal education were fundamentally divided among
themselves about what a liberal education should be. Over the last
century "liberal education" and "the humanities" have become
synonymous, at least to those with a sense of the tradition. However,
as Laurence Veysey has revealed, the term humanities fundamentally 161
Changed its meaning between 1870 and 1940, when the term became a rallying cry for an intensive interdisciplinary campaign to resurrect once again a flagging ideal. This change in meaning provides a sense of the schisms among the humanists.
The new subjects introduced under the elective principle (modern languages, history, philosophy, art and music) competed with the classics for inclusion under the title "humanities." Advocates of these new disciplines allied with the classicists as representatives of the heritage of higher civilization, though the classists did not exactly welcome them. Classicists such as Paul Shorey and Andrew F.
West died in the 1920s still insisting that the "humanities" should only refer to Greek and Latin language training. What is striking to
Yeysey, is the tendency of the new claimants to the label of humanities to assert that their own particular study is one of the humanities without developing a broader conception of the term.
Sometimes, humanists implied that the humanities comprised all those subjects that were nonscientific, but humanists were split between those who emphasized an education in culture and those who were believers in the German ideal of advanced research applied to their
own fields.And the humanists exercised their own individualism
along with everyone else.
Such was the rather confused situation before 1940. It seems to
have taken the self-conscious arrival of the social sciences to make
the humanities a concrete grouping of academic disciplines. Whatever
we might think of the advocates of science within the humanities. 162 scientism had a "shred of the capacity to unify learned men in intellectual terms. Those who reject the dominant scientific conception of the pursuit of knowledge can only wander off in a score of mutually unrelated directions," as Dorothy Ross has described the situation.^^ Even though the scientist was often as critical as the traditional humanist of the claims to science of the social scientist, all advocates of the scientific method could at least agree what scientific thinking was: "It abstracts what is measurable from finite things in the interest of formulating precise and entirely unambiguous concepts about them."^^ Despite antagonisms between pure and applied scientists and between scientists and social scientists, there was a unity of approach to scholarship itself that gave this perspective a strength that the traditional humanists did not have.
The humanists were fragmented between the classicists and the advocates of a more inclusive sense of liberal education. As the position of the classics declined there was no unity of approach among humanists to compensate for the divisiveness of the departmental structure. The historian John Higham points out, "we have no single humanistic strategy. Perhaps the most that can be said is that humanistic approaches predominate in all efforts to preserve and appreciate the complexity of experience.Divided among themselves, pursuing their own careers, trying to protect themselves from the growing scientism, advocating a shared learning in an educational structure that militated against it, the humanists stood on weak 163 ground, which weakened further as the influence of John Dewey grew Stronger.
John Dewey and Liberal Education
The ends he sought were public, not private. Truth was, to him, not merely what worked for the individual but what worked for the group, and it was achieved by cooperative action. Morality was social not individual.'' Henry Steele Commager
John Dewey's new liberalism was based on pragmatism, relativism, and empiricism. The traditionalists were trying to piece together
some of the old and some of the new in a vision of liberal education, but Dewey wanted to change the pieces entirely. To him liberal education was that which would foster his vision of a progressive,
liberal society. In other words, it was progressive education.
Dewey's new liberalism switched the emphasis from the individual
to society. All those things that in the previous century were
thought of in terms of individuals, e.g., philosophy, education, morality, freedom, were now all social questions. Freedom, for
example, was not a matter of individual struggle, as it had been for
Charles Eliot or even William James, but a matter of the "social
medium" in which one found oneself; one's own degree of liberation
depended largely upon the liberating nature of the environment.
Dewey's new liberalism was to have profound results. I will
begin by describing Dewey's vision of the new liberalism and how he
tied liberal education to it. I will then describe how Dewey's vision 164 eventually came to predominate. As further indication of Dewey’s
influence I will describe the progressive/traditionalist split within the movement for general education, which eventually led to Dewey's
denouncing the traditionalists as "reactionaries" in 1944 and forcing them to defend their own liberalism, I will conclude this section by
outlining the general nature of developments in higher education from 1945 to the present that have led to our confusing Dewey's vision of liberal education with that of the traditionalists.
Ih Liberalism and Social Action Dewey evaluates the old liberalism and gives his sense of the new. He applauds the emphasis
on individual liberty and "the central role of free intelligence in inquiry, discussion and expression" of the earlier liberalism, but he
is critical of the fact that this sense of liberty was tied to
individual economic self-interest. He felt freedom to indulge
economic self-interest should have been viewed as merely the means for
the eventual "satisfaction of the needs of man in non-economic
directions," and not as an end in itself. As an end in itself,
economic self-interest accentuated materialism and individualism to a
degree that he considered anti-social
He complained that the early liberals failed to realize that
"effective," as opposed to "legal," liberty is a function of the
social conditions existing at any given time. Thus, the primary
social quest at any given time is to find "that form of social
organization, extending to all areas and ways of living, in which the
powers of individuals shall not be merely released from mechanical 165
external constraint but shall be fed, sustained and directed." He
gives us a sense of what this means when he suggests that intelligence
IS not "an individualistic possession, at best enlarged by public discussions; it is primarily a social phenomenon."79
A liberal or liberating education in Dewey's sense has a two¬
fold meaning. First, the classroom or school is itself a "social medium that is liberating, sustaining human growth. Second, a liberating education will provide skills and attitudes that will direct students to make society a liberating "social medium" as well.
As Dewey states in Democracy and Education, education should give
"individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder."®^ The classroom then is the micro-liberating environment, which, through the cooperative, socially minded individuals it produces, gradually makes the wider environment more liberating as well. These liberated individuals would believe in social liberalism and want to put "the mechanism of abundance at the free disposal of individuals" rather than allow it to serve a small elite class. They would also be schooled in the scientific attitude of mind, for Dewey spoke often of the great aid science had been in the development of industry and suggested it could be equally useful if applied to social and political problems.
Our contemporary tendency to relate liberal education to problem solving, to innovation, and to the non-authorian teacher stems from
Dewey's influence. In his vision the student is as a potential agent 166
of social change, given experience In cooperative action, directed
towards an Interest In social relationships and control, and equipped with a scientific attitude of mind to be applied to the problems of
society. The teacher is non-authoritarian because of the tendency of
conservative Puritan teachers to abuse their authority. The teacher
is instead what some now call a "facilitator" of this problem solving,
helping the students solve the problems of their iimediate environment
and gradually turning their attention to the problems of the wider
environment. Thinking is a matter of problem solving and practical
intelligence, rather than an intellect to be cultivated. Since this
problem solving is tied to "experimental observation," students are
generally learning to be social scientists, and experiments in
education, as in any aspect of social life, are much valued. This
perspective underlies much of the discussion on liberal or general
education that takes place today.
Dewey's influence upon the concept of liberal education at the
college level was gradual and developed indirectly, since his own work
dealt mostly with primary education. Although he wrote comparatively
little about higher education, his position as America's most
influential philosopher and educator gave a disproportionate weight to
that which he did write. In The Educational Situation (1902) he
argued for the elimination of the tradition-bound college as an
independent entity. Such colleges maintained an elitist mentality,
did not deal with the centrality of vocation in human life, and were 167 preoccupied with the past. As he would later write in Democracy and Education.
The mistake in making the records and the remains of the past the material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the ore sent a more or less futile imitation of the past.®^
Altogether, Dewey challenged the traditional concept of liberal education for not being consonant with contemporary "social facts."
He wrote, "Liberal education must be consonant with realistic science and with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them." To those who argued that the traditional colleges were sanctuaries of culture,
Dewey responded that culture was meaningless if it could not operate
"in the conditions of modern life, of daily life, of political and industrial life."®^ While traditional humanists were seeking ways to find sanctuaries for culture, fearing that the idea itself was becoming lost in the expanding universities aimed at research and utility, Dewey was demanding that it either exist in the mainstream of
American life or not at all.
More important than his attacks on higher education, however, was the influence that he and the progressive education movement had upon pre-college education. Between 1900 and 1940 the percentage of the age group attending high school rose enormously, from 10 percent to 60 percent. A large number of these students were first or second generation immigrants or Blacks who previously had been denied the possibility of secondary education. This population demanded a useful 168 education, and so the scene was set for progressive influence.
According to A. Whitney Griswold this influence of "instrumentalism as
Dewey and his followers applied it to our schools" created "an enormous new secondary school population, most of which was entirely innocent of the liberal arts and their purposes."®^ The ideal of liberal education in the traditional sense became somewhat esoteric, and few had the preparation to pursue it ever if they happened to be aware of it.
Also, schools of education, most notably Teachers College at
Columbia, were producing theorists who applied progressive theory to the idea of liberal education. Traditional humanists, such as Norman
Foerster, found themselves vying for the term "liberal education" with what he called "disciples" of John Dewey. In an article published in
1939 in an educational yearbook devoted to the concept of liberal
education, Foerster accused these "disciples" of transforming the
traditional concept of liberal education beyond recognition but his
complaints had little effect.Even his own Dean, a recently
graduated Ed.D., "called for ending most required courses and for
liberalizing the program to fit individual needs.A "liberal
education" tied to the new liberalism was gaining ground.
Through Dewey's direct attacks on the traditional idea of
liberal education, through the influence of the progressive education
movement in shaping the nature of pre-college education, and through
his "disciples" who applied his theory to higher education, liberal
education became an education in the new liberalism. C. Wright Mills 169 once Observed that Dewey did not write for popular audiences as much as for “the new professional academics who became leaders in the social sciences who in turn became policy advisors and interpreters for men of power in both the political and corporate worlds."86 It is the influence exerted by these academics combined with progressive liberal politics that peaked in the "Great Society" of Lyndon Johnson which have largely shaped our contemporary meaning of the word "liberal."
There is a fundamental and unbreachable gap between the liberal ideology and the traditional humanist perspective. The liberals believe in progress and assume that in education lies "the fundamental method of social progress and reform." The general humanist position has been that to develop thoughtful, cultured individuals is tremendously difficult in itself. Humanists do not feel that education can guarantee social progress and reform, and fear that the more education is aimed in that direction, the less it is education and the more it is indoctrination.
General Education
The general education movement in this century has been an attempt to find a modern equivalent to the curricular unity once provided by the old liberal arts curriculum. Curiously, both advocates of liberal and liberalism education have used the term
"general education," though they mean quite different things by it.
The progressive had little use for the traditional concept of liberal 170 education and they used the term "general education" to describe their alternative, the one which, in fact has dominated. However, the traditionalists also spoke in terms of general education, for it was, so to speak, the only game in town. They did not want to forsake the traditionalist perspective, but they did want to be influential participants in the search for the modern equivalent to liberal education which had developed connotations of elitism and i mpracti cal i ty. In this section I will briefly outline the general education movement, distinguishing between the efforts of traditionalists and progressives within it, and also show how the traditional sense of general education was relegated to obscurity when
Dewey pronounced it was "illiberal" in 1944.
As the story is generally told, Dewey initiated the movement with a call, in 1902, for a new "philosophy of unity" to organize the curricular chaos that had resulted from the rise of the universities.
Rather than glorifying the elective principle, as Eliot had, Dewey saw it as unfortunate, arguing that students needed to be given "a survey, at least, of the universe in its manifold phases," from which stems the survey course.®^ Alexander Meiklejohn was the most notable of those who initially applied this idea to higher education,
introducing a survey course in "social and economic institutions"
first at Brown in 1910, and later in 1914 at Amherst. In the 1920s he
also organized and directed the experimental college at Wisconsin, a
two year program divided between a study of the ancient world in the
first year and modern America in the second. 171
Meiklejohn's position towards general education has often been identified with Dewey's since Meiklejohn also spoke of education for democracy. Actually he was critical of the simplistic relationship that Dewey as "social reformer" drew between education and democracy. As he wrote in 1939:
Dewey is both social reformer and philosophical thinker. He has devised both slogans and ideas... Leading men by means of slogans is not the same as leading them into the use of ideas.
Meiklejohn's position is roughly located between the traditionalists and the progressives and was an attempt to synthesize elements of each, as the experiment at Wisconsin suggests. I bother to point this out because the misunderstandings that have evolved about Meiklejohn's views show how difficult it to maintain clarity in the midst of these ideas.
The traditionalists rejected Dewey's contention that the unity of general education should be based on the principles of science with a corresponding emphasis on the social sciences, and, instead, believed that a study of the preeminent works of the past, chiefly those of the humanities, was the best way to develop the "whole man," and in turn was the best direction that the undergraduate curriculum could take. The progressive emphasis, on the other hand, was towards
the study of modern society and the social sciences, "keeping higher education closely attuned to current affairs, for it was there that
problems arose and in that context that solutions had to be tested."®^ 172
The movement for a general education gained momentum after the
First World War, with Columbia University leading the way. The progressive position was manifested in the Contemporary Civilization course which was the center piece of Columbia's general education and acknowledged the "direct responsibility of the College to the stated democratic needs of society."^0 The traditionalist alternative first appeared in the "great books" course initiated by John Erskine, which was the model for the program Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler advocated for Chicago, and later the St. John's curriculum, and the Great Books Program.
Many of the prominent defenders of the traditional sense of liberal education were involved in Erskine's course or its subsequent facsimiles, as Mortimer Adler tells us in his autobiography. Adler and Mark Van Doren were section leaders of the course and Lionel
Trilling and Jacques Barzun were among their students. Gilbert Highet also taught the course, and Barzun and Meiklejohn were later on the board of advisers of the Great Books Program, which involved the publication of sets of these books along with instructions on how to set up seminars for their discussion. It might also be added that
Scott Buchanon, who along with Stringfellow Barr founded St. John's, had also participated in a senior seminar with Meikeljohn at Amherst and was a long time friend of Adler's, as was Robert Hutchins. Thus the most prominent defenders of a traditional liberal education were to a great extent a coterie of friends, which suggests how narrow was their general base of support. 173
The traditionalist position as advocated by Hutchins and Adler received the greatest national attention in the 1930s. The platform that Hutchins' presidency gave him combined with his own charisma made him a very prominent spokesman for the traditionalist position.
However, his real influence upon the nature of general education at
Chicago was actually quite limited according to Adler and neither of them considered their efforts successful. Chicago was at least as much of a stronghold of progressive thought as Columbia. Dewey had been at Chicago as a professor and had been a member of the "Chicago
School" of philosophy, led by George Herbert Mead. The empiricism,
pragmatism, and relativism of these philosophers formed the main
tradition of the university since the beginning of the century.
Therefore, when we look closely at the situation it is rather ironic
that Chicago should be identified with the great books program and the
traditionalist position. Though Hutchins was able to garner
considerable publicity for the traditionalist position, the great
books seminars were but a small part of the general education
experiments at Chicago, and not a particularly welcome part at that.
The attention the traditionalists were able to gain is
misleading in terms of its actual influence on higher education. It
is my sense that the traditionalist position was always advocated by
only a small minority, who had to struggle even to be considered.
They were only able to gain the attention that they did by their
literary talents, the quality of their thought, and the particular
weight that Hutchins gave their arguments as the outspoken president 174 of a prestigious university. And the publicity that Hutchins was able to gain for the traditionalists was a mixed blessing; it aroused the ire of John Dewey who would eventually attack Hutchins and the traditionalists.
Though Hutchins was the most prominent advocate of an education that emphasized the great books, his position and that of Adler's was not really representative. They placed an emphasis on the
^^^sTotelian tradition that the others did not, which is why they tend to be labelled rationalists rather than humanists. The authority that
Hutchins and Adler gave to the Aristotelian tradition made the most prominent defender of the great books also, the biggest target of attack by the progressives, for Hutchins' arguments not only went against the grain of their general education but against their liberalism as wel 1.
Publication of Hutchins' Higher Learning in America aroused the wrath of many progressives. His basic argument was that higher education needed a philosophy of unity, but not one based on science.
Instead he proposed the development of a metaphysics based upon the philosophical truths of Aristotle and Aquinas about the nature of man, the nature of truth, and the nature of value. In the minds of many,
Hutchins' argument was captured by his oft-quoted syllogism:
"Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence education should be everywhere the same. iiQ? 175
Nothing could have been more contrary to Dewey's theory of education and society, and he attacked Hutchins' position in two articles published in 1937. He attacked Hutchins for his
authoritarianism," his "contempt for science," and his appeal to
fixed and eternal truths." Hutchins in turn responded with a sharply worded reply, to which Dewey responded in a similar tone.^^
Over the next few years the controversy continued, with Adler attacking the progressives for their "false liberalism" in an article published in 1939 titled "Liberalism and Liberal Education." This article is noteworthy for it is one of the few works that directly addresses the link between liberalism and liberal education, but in broadening the question to one of politics rather than education,
Adler would provoke Dewey to do the same.
In 1944, Dewey published an article in Fortune magazine that seems to me the coup de grace to the traditionalist position. He titled the article "The Challenge to Liberal Thought" and portrayed
Hutchins and those of like mind as "reactionaries," suggesting that
they were holding on to distinctions left over from an aristocratic
framework no longer valid in a democracy. He argued that the
traditional dualism of the "liberal" and the "mechanical" studies was
no longer valid, because most Americans were involved with "industry
and useful commodities and services," and that technological progress
epitomized "rational insight or science," that which liberal education
is supposed to cultivate. He developed his argument further in two
additional sections of the article. In the first, he argued that we 176
should be liberalizing our technical and vocational education by making all workers "aware of the scientific basis of the industrial
processes." He then argued that his opponents, while seeming to
reflect the spirit of ancient Greece, actually reflect the spirit of
the middle ages during which the authority of books replaced what
Dewey called "the Greek view of knowledge as a product of intelligence
exercised at first hand," Thus, not only did opponents seem elitist
and behind the times, they did not even represent the Greek spirit.^^
He concluded the article by describing the traditionalists as
"reactionaries," generally of literary backgrounds with little
appreciation of science, proponents of a "philosophy of fixation,"
mistakenly believing that "linguistic skills and materials" should be
at the center of education, and that "an adequate education...can be
obtained by a miscellaneous assortment of a hundred books, more or
less..." Finally, he summed up the issue as follows:
At bottom the issue is drawn between dogmas (so rigid that they ultimately appeal to force) and recourse to intelligent observation guided by the best wisdom already in our possession, which is the heart of the scientific method.
And as if Dewey had not buried his opponents deeply enough, he implied
a link between their thinking and totalitarian Germany. It was
Germany that had been the home of the practices and the philosophy
based on strict separation between sciences as technical therefore
everchanging, and morals based upon fixed and unchanging principles.
What seems obvious here is that Dewey is exemplifying the
dogmatism he attacks, and, despite his emphasis on observation, I do 177 not think he ever bothered to observe the actual life of St. John's
College, the most notable actualization of the thought of the traditionalists whom he attacks. Six months after Dewey's article appeared. Fortune published a rejoinder by Alexander Meiklejohn.
Among other things Meiklejohn pointed out that approximately half the classroom hours were devoted to a study of the sciences, which was more education in science than most students received. He also stressed that what they strove to do at St. John's was to "develop the processes of critical intelligence," and not to develop an allegiance to the authority of the past. Finally, he pleaded with Dewey not to characterize those who opposed his views as "illiberal"; though they disagreed with Dewey's assessment of science and the relationship of fact to value, they were themselves liberals in the best sense of the word.^^
Despite its validity, Meikeljohn's rejoinder had little effect.
Nothing could stand up to Dewey's ability to tie together the prejudices of the liberal mind. He would be echoed by spokesmen for the progressive viewpoint for years to come.
Denouement
The traditionalist's position had lost much of its stature.
Dewey's assumptions were accepted, frequently without much examination, by many influential academics, and, as a large number of students were graduating from high schools with little sense of the traditional liberal education, the old concept lost its 178 distinctiveness, blurred with the progressive's vision of liberal education, especially since the progressives seldom thought it necessary to distinguish between the two, after the Hutchins-Dewey exchanges.
There were other contributing factors to the traditionalists' downfall, such as the even greater accentuation upon research provided
by federal grants after the Second World War, money which has gone
largely to the sciences and social sciences rather than the
humanities.^® Also, since the Second World War the United States has
become more closely tied to the rest of the world in its position as
"leader of the free world." Thus, the progressives' tendency to think
in terms of societal problem solving has been further accentuated and
broadened to include the rest of the world, leading to the dismaying
notion expressed by Harland Cleveland that we must come to understand
how everything relates to everything on a global scale. And there was
the political and social upheaval of the 1960s with its demand for
educational relevancy that made the traditional position seem
particularly archaic and staid in the face of the demand for immediate
social and political action.
Of course, all of these influences had cumulative effects, and
it is impossible to give an exact date to the demise of the
traditional position. Lionel Trilling asserted a decade ago that the
traditional humanistic ideal was at the center of the general
education movement through the thirties, forties, and fifties. This
may be an overstatement of the strength of traditional humanism in the 179 general education movement, but it certainly suggests that there was still considerable life to it. at least at Columbia University.99
However, as Trilling states "by the sixties, something had happened to reduce the zeal for such education as set store by its being general."
When Daniel Bell produced his thorough study of general education in
1964 there was hardly any interest in it at all. The demise seemed complete.
To summarize: First there was and there remains the problem of the university structure which has not been congenial to any type of shared learning. Second, among advocates of a general education there has been a stronger inclination towards Dewey's position which in effect rejects that of the traditional humanists. Third, Mark Van
Doren reported in 1940 that there was little general knowledge of the history of liberal education, and there is much less knowledge of it today. When "liberal education" is mentioned, people are either confused about it, or, even more likely, identify it with liberalism.
Finally, in the most recent renewal of interest in the idea of general education beginning in the mid-seventies, the discussion has usually begun with Dewey's sense of liberal education as a premise, emphasizing either interdisciplinary efforts aimed at societal problem solving, or student freedom to choose the particular problems they are interested in. Many would still applaud the traditional humanist's aim of introducing students to the beauty of reason and virtue as expressed by the great minds and souls of the past, but such knowledge is no longer central to the educational endeavor. It is instead 180 merely one more educational commodity to consume, one more area of Study along with everything else. 181
FOOTNOTES
A. Knoin
S. K1n9^l87•6^°p'^'85.-■ '''" ‘•°^'^^- ‘'°"‘’‘>'’=
^Palmer, op. cit.
,. . Jeffreys, John Locke: Prophet of Common Sense (London: Methuer, 1967), p. 7^!---—if-LlE
Leo Straus, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Npw Ynr^• Philosophical Library, 1981), p. 7. -
^Jeffreys, op. cit., pp. 59-60; Bourne, op. cit., p. 46.
^Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason (New York: Anchor Press, 1977), p. 246. -
^Palmer, op. cit., pp. 289-301.
Q Kenneth Dolbeare, American Ideologies (Chicago: Markham, 1971), p. 51. -
10 Palmer, op. cit., pp. 429-430.
^^Clarence Karier, "The Quest for Orderly Change: Some Reflections," Higher Education Quarterly, Summer, 1979, p. 169.
^^Ibid.
1 O ^'^Commager's Empire of Reason is one example of this way of viewing American history, in which the enlightened is equated with the liberal and the good, op. cit., pp. 16-18.
^^Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 195$), pp. 3-36.
^^Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 518.
^^Ibid., p. 5.
^^Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636-1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. /b. 182
^^Heimert, op. cit., p. 425.
^^Commager, op. cit., pp. 167-168. 20 Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial Amprirs (Mpw York: Octagon, 1963), p. 6. “ --- 21 Henry Adams, as quoted in John Williard Ward, "The Age of the Common Man," in John Hingham (Ed.), Reconstruction of American History (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 93. -
^‘■As quoted in ibid., p. 94. 23 Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 30.
2^Ibid., p. 32. 2 5 John S. Burbacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities: 1636-1976 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 110.
^^Rudolph, p. 219.
^^R. Freeman Butts, The College Charts Its Course (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), pp. 91-97.
^®John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1936-1^76 (3rd Ed., Rev.), (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 151.
2^Ibid., pp. 101-102.
^^Butts, op. cit., p. 104.
^^Ibid., pp. 107-108.
^^Rudolph, op. cit., p. 124.
^^Ibid., p. 133.
^^Ibid., p. 213.
^^Brubacher and Rudy, op. cit., fn. 28, p. 451.
^^Rudolph, op. cit., p. 212.
^^Ibid., pp. 214-215. 183
W. W. rorton!"l976r.'prl48-75-l'“''“'' Professionalise (New YorN:
^^Ibid.
40 Ibid. 41 May, op. cit., pp. 31-32.
42^ V Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (New York: New American Library, 1971). -
^^Bledstein, op. cit., pp. 259-258.
^^Veysey, op. cit., p. 16.
^^Russell Thomas, The Search for a Common Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), pp. 16-19. Thomas writes that the Amherst Experiment was "an important undertaking to solve some of the problems arising from the advances of knowledge and the demands for a wide scope of vocational education," but it is not clear to me why it was important, for it did not stimulate more efforts in a similar vein as did the experiments at Harvard and the University of Virginia.
^^Brubacher and Rudy, op. cit., pp 153-161; Bledstein, op. cit., p. 129; Butts, op. cit., pp. 159-161.
^^Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), first published in 1918. As one might guess, Veblen argued that those who had built the universities had degraded higher learning by treating it as a business.
48 Henry James, Charles W. Eliot, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), pp. 204-72^7
49 Rudolph, op. cit.
50 Ibid., p. 299; Veysey, op. cit., pp. 87-98.
51 Henry James, op. cit., pp. 204-224.
52 Butts, op. cit., p. 177.
53 Morison, op. cit., pp. 326-329.
54 Ibid., pp. 347-349.
55 Rudolph, op. cit., p. 294. 184
^®Veysey, op. cit., p. 92. As Veysey points out, even tHouah Eliot was not sure that he approved of much social intercourse between the two races. Blacks were admitted to Harvard, and though "Eliot viewed Jewish students sterotypically" he "had no thought of excluding them or limiting their freedom of movement." ^ 57 Ibid., p. 93.
^®Ibid., pp. 88-89. 59 Morison, op. cit., p. 344. Eliot's "freedom" was for the strong--professors as well as students. Eliot asked at least one professor: "Can you fight when everybody is against you--when not one man is ready to lend your support?"...If you have convictions, it will sometimes be necessary to do no less." Rollo Walter Brown, Harvard Yard in the Golden Age (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1948), p. 25.
^^Edward K. Rand, "Bring Back the Liberal Arts," Atlantic Monthly, June, 1943, p. 82. -
^^As quoted in Morison, op. cit. p. 347.
C O ”'^As scientism became more wide spread in this century, efficiency became associated with "scientific management," but to Eliot: "The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself, and is capable of thinking hard and long. This is a process which requires motive and will-power." Charles W. Eliot, Education for Efficiency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), p. 15.
^^Rand, op. cit., p. 82. ^^Eliot described the university as "a voluntary cooperative association of highly individualistic persons," which is the opposite of the emphasis on community of the "College Way." Veysey, op. cit., p. 93. ^^Lionel Trilling, "The Uncertain Future of the Humanistic Educational Ideal," American Scholar, Winter, 1974/75, p. 63.
^^Veysey, op. cit., pp. 180-251. ^®Laurence Veysey, "Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities," in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Eds.), The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America: 1860-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19/9), pp. 53-b4. ^^Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, op. cit., p. 257. 185
pp. 125-133. ^^Trilling, op. cit., p. 63.
^^Edward Shils, "The Order of Learning in the United States- The Ascendancy of the University," in Oleson and Voss (Eds.) od’ cit., p. 42. ’ 73 Veysey, "Plural Organized World of the Humanities." od. cit pp. 55-57. *
^^Dorothy Ross, "Development of the Social Sciences," Ibid., pp. 107-130. ^ 7 5 John Higham, Writing American History (Bloomington. IN: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 6. ^^Ibid., p. 8.
^^Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and CharactFr" Since the 1880s (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 99. 78 John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935), pp. 35-39. ^^Ibid., pp. 69-70.
®®John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1967). ®hbid. ®^As quoted in Veysey, op. cit., p. 115. ^^A. Whitney Griswold, Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), pp. 20-22. ®^Norman Foerster, in Educational Yearbook of the International Institute (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 121. ®^J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900-1940 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 12l. ®^Clarence Karier, op. cit., p. 172.
^^Brubacher and Rudy, op. cit., p. 272. 186
^^Alexander Meiklejohn, Education Between Two Worlds (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942),"'p. 136. 89 Brubacher and Rudy, op. cit., pp. 276-278. 90 Daniel Bell, The Reforming of General Education: The Columbia College Experience in its National Setting (Hew York: Columbia University Press, 1966), pp. 14-15.- 91 ^^Mortimer Adler, Philosopher at Large (New York: MacMillan, 1977).
^^Ibid., pp. 169-171, 176-177. 93 Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: CT: Yale University Press, 1936), pp. 66-67. 94r, Butts, op. cit., pp. 299-304.
^^John Dewey, "The Challenge to Liberal Thought," Fortune, August, 1944, pp. 155-156.
^^Ibid., p. 188.
^^Alexander Meiklejohn,"Reply to John Dewey," Fortune, January, 1945, pp. 207-208.
^®Zelda Gamson, Liberating Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984), pp. 2-4. ^^It seems unclear how much support there was in the 1940s for general education, whether of the traditionalist or progressive variety. For example, despite all of the attention generated by the "Harvard Red Book" proposals for reforming general education, the Harvard faculty never passed them.
100trilling, op. cit., pp. 57-58. CONCLUSION: HINTS FOR WOULD-BE HUMANISTS
Roman humam'tas applied to mon who woro froe in every respect, for whom the question of freedom, of not being coerced, was the decisive one—even in philosophy, even in science, even in the arts. Hannah Arendt
Having heard, and read, my criticism of liberalism's encroachment upon liberal education and liberalism's insidious effects upon the humanistic ideal, a friend suggested I conclude on a more positive note: How would I organize a conference for humanists on the future of the humanist ideal? It seemed a good idea, and I was pleased by its possibilities until, as suddenly as she had suggested it, she dismissed it as too improbable: "No.. .humanists don't go to conferences like that." "What do they do?" I asked. "They write letters to each other," she answered.
Rather than imagine a conference, I continued to think about my friend's closing comment and gradually perceived a distinction between humanists and those of us who are interested in organizing efforts to protect the humanities and revive the humanistic ideal. In our efforts to organize, I suspect there are some elements of the liberal
Puritan, and often we lose sight of the spirit of humanism that we are trying to protect. So, I would like to conclude with an open letter to those who fret about saving the humanities and reviving the humanistic ideal.
187 188
In contrast to the organizers, the humanists rarely talk about liberal education, but tend to go about their business of cultivating their own intellects and sharing this cultivation with others. While there are noteable exceptions, humanists don't usually write much about liberal education. Hannah Arendt, for example, wrote more books and articles than I can count, but only one essay about education. I think that humanists who exemplify the life of the mind and treat teaching as an art are reticent to talk about the intellectual virtues they cultivate, fearing a certain priggishness in talking about those things which are cared about for their own sake.^ These humanists are not drawn to conferences on education, because they don't believe that one can learn much there about the art of teaching, and they dread the endless talk of "new visions of educational purpose and possibility," which tells them nothing that they have not heard before.
Akin to their reluctance to talk about education, humanists tend to resist organization, even if the purpose of the organizational efforts is to protect the humanities and themselves. Because of the absence of effective organization among humanists, the American
Association for the Advancement of the Humanities was founded in 1977 but disbanded a few years late due to lack of support from humanists themselves.
The apathy of humanists towards such organizing efforts is often attributed to excessive individualism on their part or even their narrow preoccupation with their own specialized areas of study. This may be true for many, or even most, professors of the humanities--! 189 don't know-but there is also a quality of individuality possessed by the best humanists and I think we must distinguish such individuality from an excess of individualism.
When organizers assert that "humanists especially should take a greater interest in teaching the humanities well" or suggest that
people in foundations of education should band together with teacher- educators to cooperate in the planning of revitalized humanities," they are failing to grasp the nature and purpose of humanists.^ Such suggestions are an insult to true humanists, who regard teaching as a natural extension of the life of the mind and treat teaching as an art. The implication that educators can teach humanists to be better humanists is quite naturally offensive to them. Those who make such suggestions are implying that many professors in the humanities are not true humanists, which is surely true, but I think we are misguided if we think we can help them to be so through pedagogical aids and discussions of curriculum. We might be able to help some professors become more competent instructors, but this has little to do with reviving the humanist ideal. We are instead trying, in our own way, to patch-up the cracks in the humanist ideal resulting from the liberalization of higher education. Such efforts have little to do with making our universities more of a home for the cultivation of the
intellect; they are merely a shoring up of the weakened position of
humanities departments within our universities.
Consider the possibility that our universities cannot provide a
home for culture as they are presently structured. It is a real 190
likelihood and should temper a bit our eagerness for organizing.
Jacques Barzun argues convincingly that our universities have made
scholarship an end in itself rather than a servant of culture.
Scholarship of this sort is diametrically opposed to culture, scholars
being too encumbered with the "minutiae of analytic methodism" to cultivate minds; our concentration upon methods of analysis obstructs
our view of a work of art, "rather than giving a jewel the setting it
deserves." The kind of scholarship encouraged by today's
universities probably does more to destroy than nurture culture.
If we cannot teach professors of humanities to be humanists and
the university cannot provide a home for culture, what, then, are we would-be humanists to do with our desire to revive the humanist ideal?
Well, I think we need to think about that quite a bit. In the process
we might consider Barzun's prediction that the best hope for the
humanities lies in the forming of small enclaves, "lay monasteries,"
which will protect the tradition of the humanities from a world
largely indifferent to it and nurture it for growth at some future
time. At first this may seem a pessimistic prediction, but I suggest
we think of it as a realistic appraisal of our present situation and
use this acknowledgment of our present circumstances as the basis of
inquiry which may lead to change. Such change is unlikely, however,
if we continue along with our liberal Puritan sense of what we and
others ought to do to save the humanities. What we ought to do is
take pleasure in them, and listen to Barzun's reminder that we 191 cultivate our minds not because we should but because It Is pleasurable to do so.
There may be more scholars who desire this pleasure than Barzun realizes. I suggest that we look around our own institutions and see
If we can find people who wish to talk about these matters. My guess
IS that there are a number of humanists and would-be humanists who feel largely isolated and alone in their departments; the first task would seem to be to find them, get to know them, and see what affinities they share with ourselves and with each other. What seems essential here is that we find a basis for conversation which draws people together, and I do not think the topic should be the improvement of the humanities. Any topic would work which would let people discover a "kinship in what pleases and displeases,"^ which leads them to want to see more of each other, to become colleagues, intellectual friends. Out of these friendships, efforts may or may not develop to participate in interdisciplinary efforts, or whatever, but the point is that these are the conditions out of which culture might begin to grow once again, even amidst the divisive forces of the university. We might even come to find sufficient affinity and desire for culture among enough academics that through our affinity groups we can begin to consider ways in which to make our institutions more conducive to the humanist ideal. If, on the other hand, we come to find that we cannot change our institutions much, we may look at such efforts as the beginnings of an underground network of individuals who cherish humane studies, the beginning of Barzun's "lay monasteries." 192
Minimal though it may seem, my suggestion does at least start on the right foot, and is markedly different in empnasis an attitude from the ways we usually go about the problem. First, it does not assume that those most desirous of realizing the humanist ideal are to be found in departments of humanities and does not confuse maintaining these departments with maintaining the ideal. Secondly, in making the enjoyment of the company of others the basis upon which to proceed, it sets a different tone for the enterprize than I detect in many of our efforts, one of participating in culture rather than trying to organize it. Third, it is based on the common insights that individuals share rather than some model for integrating various disciplines, and it makes conversation about what matters to us primarily an end in itself and only secondarily as possible ground out of which joint efforts may grow. Unfortunately, most efforts at organizing the revival of the humanities or the humanist ideal ignore these points and so fail; one cannot revive the humanities while ignoring their simplest and most basic tenets.
This difference in approach may be contrasted with our liberalism which values diversity over unity, action over contemplation, and individual uniqueness over shared affinities. The liberal mind values clashes between diverse points of view, and values analysis over intuitive understanding, so it does not readily notice that the richness of conversation is based upon shared assumptions out of which particular differences are developed. Since our shared tradition has broken down and the house of intellect is furnished in a 193 hodge-podge of various methods, vocabularies, and values, our conversations founder upon fundamental differences in assumptions and the lack of common language.
Advocates of the humanist ideal must be able to recognize those who speak from a liberal humanitarian viewpoint, so that we do not mistakenly see affinities that do not exist, and may know when fruitful conversation is possible and when it is not. Viewing education as the primary instrument of social change and for meeting the "needs" of individuals and society, the liberal simplifies everything to fit this schema, including the relationship between right reason and conduct. The liberal's multi-faceted vision can easily confuse us with self-righteous talk of "satisfying needs."
These assumptions manifest themselves in different ways, as I have shown, one minute emphasizing what the citizen needs to know to be a good citizen, the next making of education a kind of psychotherapy, a few minutes later envisioning a particular kind of education for each collective group, another moment one tailored to each individual.
Whatever value such efforts have, we must remember that they distract us from our priorities as humanists. With enough independence of mind we can distinguish ourselves from those who would carry us off along one of these liberal tangents or coerce us to meet their needs.
Our own need is to maintain and develop the distinctions between
humanist categories of thought and liberal ones, and to be wary of
being induced to use the liberal slogans of the day. If we speak of a
"connected vision" we need to make clear that it is a personal vision 194 based on a sense of taste which transcends a dichotomy between the subjective and objective world that underlies the view of the liberal social scientist. The virtues we are cohcerned with are individual virtues; the students are individual students. Visions of shaping society and solving social problems take us beyond what we are trying to do. And in what we are trying to do conversation is essential, for while our visions are personal they are worked through with others and reflect a relation with and often a debt to them. The issues which most concern us are those which we share as human beings; the commonality of our temporary and uncertain existence in this world outweighs our differences. Whatever our particular differences and our need to explore them, we keep in mind that ultimately we need to come to terms with each other as human beings, not as members of different races or sexes.
And the one need and only need that humanism seeks to satisfy is the need to speculate meaningfully about our lives and our world.
This thinking-for-its-own-sake may confer "useful" benefits, but we mistake the nature of this thought if we see it as essentially a means to other ends. If we are to speak of an education that "liberates," we need to make clear that it liberates us from the mundane and the tawdry through the enjoyment of "things beautiful," and it liberates us from being swayed by the unexamined opinions of others by developing minds "not easily imposed upon." Some humanists now speak of an education that "empowers" and I urge them to reconsider this term. I do not see how it illuminates anything in the traditional 195 humanist ideal; if it illuminates anything, it is our liberal Puritan desire to unite thought and action, on the firm, but misguided, liberal principle that thought is only valuable as the precursor to action.
For the ancient Greeks, the "right word at the right moment" was itself a form of action, and they understood how the right word could initiate an unpredictable series of actions. Our conversations with others may do more than we think to revive the traditional ideal of liberal education. 196
FOOTNOTES
^Michael Oakeshott's words on the matter seem typical of J.TrhJ' V Virtues may be imparted oSlJ by a teacher who really cares about them for their own sake and never stoops to the priggishness of mentioning them. Not the cry but the rising of the wild duck impels the flock to follow him in flight." As quoted in R. S. Peters, "Michael Oakshott's Philosophy of Education " in Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Eds.), Politics and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196817 P. 52.—^- 2 Christopher J. Lucas, "Positivist Socio-Pathology and the Contemporary Plight of the Humanities," in Alan H. Jones (Ed.), The Humanities in Education: Rebirth or Burial in the 1980s (Ann Arbor” • P'^’akken Publications, 1983), pp. ^8-29. The quotations are abbreviated for easier readability. 3 Jacques Barzun, "Scholarship Versus Culture," The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1984, p. 103. -
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